Re: [Trisquel-users] I met RMS yesterday. We talked about Trisquel 8, this is what he said...

[marioxcc . MT]

He was an intelligent man worthy of admiration. Now he is not. Old age is not  
an excuse. Just to give an example: Paul Erdős worked until the last of his  
days. He died when he was in a conference about mathematics.

Re: [Trisquel-users] I met RMS yesterday. We talked about Trisquel 8, this is what he said...

[marioxcc . MT]

> it is not enough of a "contribution" to be worth that amount of toxicity.

Free feel to ignore my messages then. Taking into account that you use the  
word “toxicity” without even knowing what it means, your commentary would  
not be missed by me at all.


There is no reason for me to be nice when pointing people's mistakes. I am  
intentionally harsh, as it should be. Nobody deserves kind words for doing  
things wrong. That privilege is reserved to the occasions when people do  
things right (and I am nice in those situations).


> Pointing out your hypocrisy was a separate statement.

As already stated, I contribute to free software, even though it is not my  
obligation. On the other hand, Stallman is obligated to contribute to free  
software since he is the director of the Free Software Foundation.What  
does he do? He spends his time traveling to expensive cities and living a  
luxurious life. That he spends a minuscule amount of time in each of his tour  
destinations spreading the word of free software is barely better than doing  
absolutely nothing; by far, it falls short of fulfilling his duty, let alone  
of making him a person worthy of admiration.


> Magic Bananas argument was that RMS's time is better spent spreading  
information about free software [...] You failed to adequately address that  
argument and focused instead on the second statement, committing a red  
herring.


If you refer to this quote: “Today, Stallman's advocacy is far more useful  
than the code he could contribute. Sure, what he says is on the Web.” this  
is beside my point: that Stallman does nothing to solve the problems he  
complains about. What has he done to replace Intel ME? Nothing; what is he  
doing about proprietary JS (no, he did not write LibreJS)? Nothing; what is  
he doing about proprietary computer-phones (“smart” phones) Nothing; what  
has he done about graphics cards which require proprietary drivers? Yet  
again, nothing!; and about proprietary updates of CPU firmware? take a guess;  
he does nothing (and again, addressing the problems that threaten freedom of  
computing is his moral duty as the leader of the Free Software Foundation).

Re: [Trisquel-users] I met RMS yesterday. We talked about Trisquel 8, this is what he said...

[marioxcc . MT]

> It has everything to do with my critique to you. Not only you do far less  
than Stallman for free software but you feel entitled to call him lazy.


Again this is the ad hominem fallacy. Given that you seem to not to  
understand this concept, do a simple web search (1, 2). That will bring  
plenty of web sites that will try to explain it to you. But probably no  
amount of explanations will suffice, as you have already proved that you are  
incapable of following arguments and of recognizing your mistakes when you  
recommended a security practice that would have been broken 2 decades ago and  
on top of that, defended it with ludicrous arguments.


Whenever I make a contribution, I do so for the sake of the contribution  
itself, not for the credit, nor bragging, nor for proving my worth to anybody  
(which seems to be what you think). Thus I have absolutely no interest in  
discussing with you my contributions.


I have only replied so far to you for the sake of other readers who may be  
misled by your comments. Since I have already given my arguments, my  
discussion with you ends here.

Re: [Trisquel-users] I met RMS yesterday. We talked about Trisquel 8, this is what he said...

[marioxcc . MT]

>GNU Emacs alone is sufficient to earn RMS a place in history.

Stallman did not write what is currently GNU Emacs. Many people did. His  
contribution is tiny.


It is a common mistake to give most of the credit of a project to the first  
person who participated. When projects become big enough to be noteworthy,  
any individual contributor has only done a small part (in proportion).


> Let alone his other projects/initiatives, GNU and GPL.

Just as a above, GNU is not Stallman work. It is the work of many people and  
he is just one of the many contributors.


It is worth noting that the FSF requires Copyright assignment for the most  
important GNU software (GCC, coreutils, etc.), but the FSF does not pay for  
this development.


> What did Jesus ever do but die on the cross?

If the fictitious personage of Jesus (the superhero/supervillain from the  
Christian tale) is based on a historical (real) person, and this person died  
crucified, then he is just another victim of the brutality of the Romans; he  
would be far from the only one and his death does not benefit us in any way.  
For that matter, the Roman Marcus Licinius Crassus crucified thousands of  
slaves for rebelling, which is by far a much greater tragedy.

Re: [Trisquel-users] I met RMS yesterday. We talked about Trisquel 8, this is what he said...

[marioxcc . MT]

> Stallman has been spreading the word about free software. All around the  
world.


Correct. He gives himself a luxurious life as a traveler of the world's big  
cities, where people celebrate him for his past contributions (Emacs, GNU,  
the GNU GPL, etc.), achievements of an era long gone.


Oh, and as part of his never-ending voyage he talks (sometimes for hours)  
about a topic that is literally a few clicks away from nearly anybody (there  
is plenty of information about free software online).


> He thinks new issues and writes about them too:  
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html


This is just an euphemism for “he complains about what is wrong with  
computers (w.r.t. software freedom) and asks that other people (never him!)  
do something about it!”. What has he done to solve the problems that he  
complains about: Intel ME, graphic cards firmware, proprietary JS, etc.? As  
far as I know, nothing.


> What have you "personally contributed in the last year to free software"?  
Should I call you "lazy and unwilling to move a finger"?


First, note that what I do has no bearing on my critique to Stallman.  
Believing otherwise would be the ad hominem fallacy.


In the last year I have contributed mostly fixes of software errors (the so  
called “bugs”) to existing free software projects. In a public project I  
have published computer-verified proofs in higher order logic (HOL4,  
specifically). However I will not elaborate on my contributions because again  
this is irrelevant to the discussion.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Sparse file issue w/KVM

[marioxcc . MT]

Hello.

I have never used Whonix, and I have some experience with KVM, but I use it  
without libvirt.


How are you checking “the size” of the file? What is the output of the  
command (copy and paste it here or upload it as an attachment)?


If you use “ls -l”, this will tell you the logical file size. This is not  
necessarily the same as the space it uses on the file system. In particular,  
sparse files can use much less space than the size reported by “ls -l”.


Use “du --si FILE” (where “FILE” is the path to the file you want to  
examine) to know the approximate amount of space it is using on the file  
system; if this command gives around 100 GB then you know that the file is  
not being created as sparse; the next step would be to investigate further  
this problem; else you will have to continue looking for the source of the  
problem elsewhere.


Are you sure that you have enough space in the filesystem to extract those  
files? Use “du --si” to check that.

Re: [Trisquel-users] It's over, Bill Gates switches to Android :D

[marioxcc . MT]

There is nothing noteworthy here.

Microsoft is more than Bill Gates, and it will continue producing proprietary  
software.


Moreover, there is not anything noteworthy with Android. It makes no  
difference that it uses Linux (the kernel). It just yet another proprietary  
system. People pay for computer-phones with Android but they do not have any  
control over them, the developer company does. It is effectively, as if they  
were rented.

Re: [Trisquel-users] I met RMS yesterday. We talked about Trisquel 8, this is what he said...

[marioxcc . MT]

“He looked at me and said...

"I want Trisquel 8 too.."”

As is typical of Stallman, he complains and says what he wants to be done,  
but does not do anything about it. Although he has done real work in the  
past, now he is lazy and unwilling to move a finger (think about it: what has  
he personally contributed in the last year to free software?).

Re: [Trisquel-users] Who of this community honestly runs Trisquel GNU/Linux?

[marioxcc . MT]

I use Debian 9. Although Trisquel has a nice ideology, it is technologically  
deficient. For example, there is neither the will nor the manpower to  
generate new releases in reasonable time.

Re: [Trisquel-users] [Poll] Should Trisquel 9 be Based on Debian?

[marioxcc . MT]

An additional difference from the ones mentioned by other users:

Debian accepts the Artistic License 1.0 as free software while the FSF does  
not.


Thus Debian contains Simutrans in the “free” section, while a  
distribution that follows the FSF guidelines would not include it at all.


I once asked the Simutrans developers to release it as free software. At my  
surprise, they took offense and banned me from their forum.

Re: [Trisquel-users] what is control + click in netbeans to emacs the same equivalent work?

[marioxcc . MT]

Hello.

I do not know what Ctrl+click does in NetBeans. Another user seems to imply  
that it finds the definition of the identifier clicked (function name, etc.).


There are several ways to do this in GNU Emacs.

The traditional way is using the etags program to generate a data-base of the  
definitions and then loading that in Emacs. Many software have a “tags”  
target in the Makefile so you can do “make tags” but you can also call  
etags manually. There are also other implementations of the same  
functionality of etags. This method is described in §28.3 Find Identifier  
References of the GNU Emacs manual. The main command is accessed through  
“M-.”. The disadvantage of etags is that it has to be rebuilt manually  
and (AFAIK) it does not automatically find definitions in system files.


Another way built-in into Emacs is using imenu. This works only for  
definitions in the same buffer (file).


The most powerful way that works for many programming languages is probably  
with Semantic mode. I have never used it to any meaningful extent. It has a  
section in the GNU Emacs manual and a manual of its own.


Additionally, many major modes that are capable of interactive evaluation  
(for example, SLIME) have their own implementation of “go to the definition  
of this identifier”. Obviously the details depend on the major mode.


If you need more help, subscribe to the help-gnu-emacs mailing list and ask  
there.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Please ban marioxcc from this forum

[marioxcc . MT]

>Marioxcc has clearly posted discrimination towards women and his comments  
are not only negative, but destructive, irrational and should not be part of  
this community.


>He had made some horrible comments against woman and I am sad to see such  
ugly thoughts contaminating Trisquel community.


Saying the truth that you do not want to hear is not “discrimination”.

That you can not wrap your head around the fact that there have been 17 times  
as much male Nobel Prize laureates (something you have choose as a benchmark,  
not me) than female Nobel Prize laureates is not my fault.


That A. Byron –who was the “first programmer” in a fairy tale told by  
feminists– never saw a computer in her life is not my fault, so do not  
complaint to me. The fault is of those social justice warriors and  
pro-multiculturalists that want to fool the community into thinking that the  
first computer programmer was a person who died decades before the first  
universal (Turing-complete) came into existence.


Neither is my fault that those MTF transsexuals that undergo the  
erroneously[1] called “sex change/reassignment surgery”, pay a quack to  
mutilate their genitals into a deep injury that struggles to close itself and  
that they call this injury a "vagina" and prevent it from closing by  
introducing foreign objects on it. That is what they do, as you will find by  
doing a quick search of the academic literature.


The problem here is not me, as I just bring to your field of view the facts  
that you ignore. The problem is that you want to pretend that these facts do  
not exist, because they expose to anybody how absurd your your social justice  
warrior world-view is.


What you are doing in starting this thread is a well known tactic of the  
social justice warrior herd: When all the people that are present to speak  
are themselves, they say that they want free speech and all voices to be  
heard. When somebody from the outside brings some facts that bursts their  
bubble, then all the cries for free speech cease and are replaced by the  
yells that the dissenting arguments are shut as forcefully as possible.


In the United States, the herd mentality is pervasive that the same social  
justice warriors that otherwise would cry for freedom of speech have managed  
to deter people with dissenting opinions from giving a speech in their  
university. Isn't it ironic?


-
If I am banned for saying the truth that some people do not want to hear into  
the ears that this forum is, then so shall it be, for the truth that you are  
afraid of is exactly the truth that you ought to hear. It would not be the  
first time, nor the last. You can shut your ears and close your eyes, and be  
oblivious to the reality, but you can not shut my voice.


There will be always something to be done, and my lifetime is not enough to  
do it all. I have used enough of it already trying to speak to somebody who  
is deaf because he does not want to hear. Thus, I conclude my participation  
in this thread with the above text.


[1]: The sex of an individual is defined in the more general way, by the  
gametes that the physiology of the organism gonads corresponds to, or in  
humans and their evolutionary relatives, by karyotype, provided the absence  
of anomalous localization of the SRY gene. Since we can not modify genes  
(beyond epigenetics) nor replace the gonads of an individual with those of  
the other sex, it follows that there is no way to change sex. You can find a  
source is basically any biology book.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Please recommend a free-software Mercurial hosting service

[marioxcc . MT]

I will not engage in further discussion with you, because you are interested  
only in criticizing my person, instead of addressing my arguments. This is  
the ad hominem fallacy and is not a valid argument.


Nonetheless, I fell compelled to address your attempt to spread insulting  
misinformation about my country, not because of you, but for the sake of  
other readers of this forum that may fall into your dirty trick.


>For your information byou are Mexican so you are as worth or even less than  
a Women. I mean there are more women with Science Nobel prizes than Mexicans.


I would not take the Nobel Prizes as a proxy for scientific success. Although  
I have no time to write a dissertation on the topic I can mention one  
important reason: there is no Nobel prize for Mathematics, despite that  
Mathematics is the discipline requiring the most intellectual capability.


Anyway, for whatever merit the Nobel prize has –which in my opinion, is  
very overestimated– your comparison is extremely biased towards women. You  
compared the population of Mexico with the much larger population of women.  
You are giving women a huge numerical advantage.


The INEGI gives a population of 120,000,000 for Mexico[2]. The world  
population is approximately 7,200,000,000[1]. Of these, roughly half are  
women, that is, 3,600,000,000. Both data points are taken in the latest  
available year in both data sets for consistency, and rounded to 2  
significant digits. Counting the Economy prize as part of the Nobel Prizes  
(sometimes it is not counted) there have been 3 Mexican Nobel laureates and  
48 female Nobel laureates.


You can take the average population per year for both Mexicans and women  
while the Nobel price has been in existence, and you will obtain a similar  
ratio. For a quick comparison, as you proposed, using the current numbers  
suffices.


So there is 1 Mexican Nobel laureate for each 40,000,000 currently living  
Mexicans, and there is 1 female Nobel laureate for each 75,000,000 currently  
living females.


Conclusion: Mexicans are twice as effective as obtaining Nobel prizes than  
women overall. Mexican men are four times as effective as obtaining Nobel  
prize than females overall.


-
Also, I know and acknowledge that my country is not successful in science and  
engineering compared to Europe and the United States. Therefore, I would not  
demand that people pretend that Mexico and those countries are equal in this  
regard. But I am not indifferent to the current situation of my country. I  
put my grain of salt by being an autodidact since personal limitations  
currently prevent me from going to an university.


The difference between this and your posture is that you and your herd of  
social justice warriors want everybody to think that everybody is equal. In  
specific, that men and women are equally capable, but this is a delusion. It  
is a contemporary truth and an historical fact that men are more capable in  
intellectual matters. You can take a look at the top performers, current or  
historical, in any intellectual field (mathematics, physics, chemistry, Go,  
Chess) and almost everybody you find will be a man.


Given that you like to compare using the Nobel prize (again, that is your  
choice, not mine), consider that there are roughly the same number of men and  
women at any given moment, yet so far only 48 women have been laureates,  
compared to 822 men. In other words, men are 1,700% as successful in earning  
Nobel Prizes as women.


-
Having made these clarifications, the reader of this forum is well aware that  
the only value in your non-arguments is their humorous value. Since my work  
here is done, and my time is limited, I withdraw from this discussion.


[1]:  
https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_population.php

[2]: http://www.beta.inegi.org.mx/temas/estructura/

Re: [Trisquel-users] Please recommend a free-software Mercurial hosting service

[marioxcc . MT]

Thanks you. This is an useful (and the only) answer for my query.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Please recommend a free-software Mercurial hosting service

[marioxcc . MT]

I acknowledge that I made a mistake in assuming that you were from the United  
States.


Let us try to recap. By a wide margin. most programmers are male, and  
moreover “he” is the generic pronoun in English. Then, why do you use  
“she” to refer to an undetermined programmer?


I know the reason. It is because you believe that men are the evil  
oppressors, basically ogres, and women are pure and vulnerable damsels in  
distress with long and blond hair like Rapunzel.


Thus for your eyes, male programmers do not matter. You give all importance  
to females and your language reflects this. You do not even think that  
dismissing male programmers is something wrong. After all, they are male, so  
they are evil ogres. They do not deserve any mention in your mind.


And if somebody, like me, complains, is because he must be a “bigot” if  
he thinks that the evil ogres (men) deserve any recognition.


But men are not ogres. Men are the pillars of modern society. Men built and  
continue building modern society. Nearly every technology that we use on a  
daily, and that is the only thing that separates us from the stone age, has  
been invented, developed and deployed by men.


So if you hate men so much, you can stop using your computer right now. The  
transistor was invented by a team of men (Shockley, Bardeen, and many more),  
the theoretical background of electricity was devised by several men through   
a period of around 100 years (Maxwell, Ampere, Faraday, etc.). You can also  
stop using electric appliances, and cars for that matter (Marcus, Diesel,  
Benz, etc.). You will end up living in a cave.


>3.- I've read (yeah because people who are smart actually read) a lot of  
technical books that use the word "she".


Oh right. Technical books are always right and never use incorrect English,  
right?


Just because some other people use “she” as generic, this does not mean  
that it is standard English. Most publications (personal observation) that  
use one of either “he“ or “she”, use “he”, and thus your  
reasoning would lead you to use “he” as well since it is the prevalent  
convention as technical writing.


>4.- You are so bigot that you find the word "she" offensive. There is not a  
single reason to feel offended. Yet you do.


What do people do when they do do not have any argument against the critique?  
They try to dodge the critique by criticizing the other person and ignoring  
the argument as you have done here calling me “bigot”. This is the ad  
hominem fallacy.


>5.- The only reason the word "he" is generic is because of tradition. There  
is no other reason. I refuse to follow old stupid traditions.


I guess that by “stupid tradition” you mean the etymology of the word,  
which is just like most words we use in day to day speech. I already  
referenced the origin of the word “he” as generic: The most prevalent  
meaning of “man” used to be generic centuries ago, and “he” has been  
generic since then.


That is the reason that the generic pronoun in English is “he”, not  
“she”. This is en etymological fact of English, regardless of whether you  
like it or not. If you do not like the English language, free feel to speak  
whatever language you find acceptable according to your social justice  
warrior complex.


>I hope one day you can come to latinamerica and realize what is actually to  
be a nice human being. Lots of latinamericans are wonderful and warm human  
beings.


I live in Latin America. You are right, it's such a nice place with wonderful  
human beings, unicorns and fairies. Actually people is so nice here in Mexico  
that it is a common event that innocent citizens are kidnapped by the  
kind-hearted police or else by cartels, tortured and quartered, and then they  
leave the cadavers in mass graves to be found weeks or months later, or  
simply dumped in the streets for anybody to see.


That is to say nothing about the wonderful human beings that politicians are  
across all of Latin America. They are so kind hearted that Latin American  
heads of state are routinely judged for corruption, as Luiz da Silva and his  
associates, just to name an example.


You are right, this is such a nice place and we have such a nice people.

-
If I say “A programmer complies his code...“ you will say that I am a  
bigot, sexist, regressive, and all of that, yet this is standard English and  
does not exclude anybody.


If you say “A programmer complies hercode...” then you think that you are  
progressive, egalitarian, stand for social justice, and so on.


Do you see the problem here? The herd mentality of social justice that you  
belong to do exactly the kind of discrimination they so much complain about,  
yet they see it as a virtue, because they see the groups they discriminate  
(males in this case) as evil ogres and unworthy of any equal treatment,  
despite so much talk of “equality”.


Having elaborated on my point and addressed your arguments (or lack 

Re: [Trisquel-users] One-line password generator.

[marioxcc . MT]

>That is true: it cost US$ 250,000 and used 1,856 custom chips to crack one  
DES key in a little more than two days.


This is grossly misleading. It is like saying “It cost 10,000,000 USD to  
build your CPU”, conflating the cost of the equipment (semiconductor plant)  
with a single unit of output (the CPU). 250,000 USD is the cost to build the  
equipment. The cost to crack a key is much cheaper and is basically only the  
cost of electricity and maintenance plus a tiny fraction of the cost of the  
equipment (it is amortized over many runs).


>At one trillion guesses per second, the NSA needs 6118 years to crack the  
password


Your emphasis on “billions” and “trillions” to make the wimpy entropy  
of your password generation scheme appear impressive merely adds to the  
humorist value of your message.


Your “trillion guesses per second” is an arbitrary number. You are  
deluding yourself you think that any serious attacker will be so limited.  
This is roughly the computing power of one Bitcoin miner with a cost of  
around 100 USD. Of course, Bitcoin miners are highly specialized and can not  
be used for password cracking. This is meant as an illustration of the cheap  
cost of computing equipment. And again, computing equipment can be reused, so  
the cost per run is even lower. You could argue than Bitcoin miners are cheap  
because there are economies of scale, but so there will be in any serious  
brute-force attack.


If the password hash is iterated, as most are, this adds just a couple orders  
of magnitude to the cost.


>Do you realize that means the effort (basically the time and energy) to  
crack the password by brute force is multiplied by 2^7.6 = 194?


It would, if we still were in 1998, but we are not. We are not stuck with  
20-years-old technology. Today's digital electronics are much faster, cheaper  
and energy-efficient.


I am sorry if the number 194 sounds big in your mind. Factors like this are  
routinely ignored in cryptographic analysis. As a rough rule of thumb,  
computing power to cost ratio doubles every 1.5 years (this is not Moore law,  
but it is related). 19 years is thus an increase by a factor of  
2^12.7≈6500. Your factor of 2^7.6 pales in comparison.


Conclusion: In 2017, your suggested scheme is more broken than DES in 1998.

>Here is an excerpt from 'man urandom', which makes my point:

No, it does not. You tried to change the argument without anybody noticing  
but your attempt failed. I quote you with emphasis added:


>Notice also that my solution uses /dev/random, not /dev/urandom.  
/dev/urandom providing only pseudo-randomness, there is a risk (although it  
should be OK) of a bug


Your original point was about bugs. The man page talks about cryptographic  
attacks.


Regarding the risk of cryptographicaly attacks on the CSPRNG, this only  
affects the conditional entropy of subsequent bytes when attacker knows part  
of the past output of /dev/urandom, which is not the case here. Moreover, the  
fact that the entropy pool is continuously mixed with new entropy makes any  
attack on the CSPRNG algorithm much more difficult.


Also, a cryptographic attack can always compromise the security of a  
practical cryptographic system, so saying “Don't use this because it is  
vulnerable to cryptographic attacks” is equivalent to saying “Do not use  
any modern cryptography”.


If you are so afraid of cryptographic breaks, free feel to use the one-time  
pad instead of GNU PG to encrypt your data.


-
Enough of giving you free lessons about the cost of brute force attacks. I am  
sharing my knowledge altruistically, but I gain nothing, and I have other  
things to do, so I withdraw from this discussion. If you want to learn about  
brute force attacks, a good starting point would be the paper  
“Understanding brute force” by D. J. Bernstein.

Re: [Trisquel-users] One-line password generator.

[marioxcc . MT]

I can see you replied with the attitude of “I am smarter than you”, but  
you just succeeded in showing your incompetence.


Your method gives at most 15.9 bits of entropy per word. 4 words give a lowly  
63.6 bits.


DES, which has 56 bit keywords, was obsolete in 1998 because keys could be  
recovered easily with exhaustive search. The EFF a even built a machine to  
crack DES using brute-force search. Your passwords are just 7.6 bits above a  
system broken 2 decades ago. Maybe your method would have been a good  
recommendation in 1960.


This is a textbook example of why you should NOT try to implement a  
security-sensitive program (even a script is a program) when you have no idea  
of what you are doing.


>They are certainly *much* easier to remember (and probably faster to type)  
than "pvQx697b88nfDJKv8LQ4Mg" (password your first command can output) and  
much stronger than "w5eJ".


Your reading still is as poor as your cryptography knowledge. I never  
suggested using a 4-character key like “w5eJ”. I proposed this as a  
method to memorize a longer password incrementally, and I suggested 96 bit  
keys. There is a big difference.


>/dev/urandom providing only pseudo-randomness, there is a risk (although it  
should be OK) of a bug that would help the cracker.


No.

In Linux /dev/random (/drivers/char/random.c) the raw data from the entropy  
sources are passed through the same mixing algorithm used for /dev/urandom.  
Moreover, both devices use the same entropy sources.


>It returns the current number of seconds since January 1, 1970.

No, it doesn't, because of leap seconds.

[Trisquel-users] One-line password generator.

[marioxcc . MT]

I have the following line in my Bash init file. I am sharing it with you in  
case you

find it useful:

“alias gen-password="head -c 16 /dev/urandom | base64 | head -c 22 &&  
echo"”


This generates a password with just above 128 bits of entropy. I generate all  
of my web site passwords this way.


Some people do not recommend “memorable passwords” at all. The reasons  
are as explained next.


If the password is not important (for example, account of web forums) then  
you can use store it in a plain text file or a password manager.  Firefox has  
a built-in password manager which works fine. Here memorability does not  
matter at all, as you just have to copy and paste, or let the password  
manager fill it automatically. Anyway, one could not memorize enough  
passwords for all the things that require one (esp. web sites).


If the password is important, then for a reasonable amount of entropy, a  
memorable password will be too long and VERY slow to input. I suggest the  
following approach:


Generate a 3-byte long password, for example:

mario@svetlana [0] [/home/mario]
$ head -c 3 /dev/urandom | base64
w5eJ

Write it in a paper or leave it in the terminal. Invent a mnemonic for it or  
just memorize as is. In this case, I can think of “_

Re: [Trisquel-users] One-line password generator.

[marioxcc . MT]

Sorry, the message was truncated and I can not modify it. Here is the rest:

mario@svetlana [0] [/home/mario]
$ head -c 3 /dev/urandom | base64
w5eJ

Write it in a paper or leave it in the terminal. Invent a mnemonic for it or  
just memorize as is. In this case, I can think of “_W_ill has _5_ fingers  
in _e_ach _J_and (hand spelled wrong)”.


Several times through the day, try to remember the password and *then* look  
at the paper or terminal to check. Allow yourself 1 day to memorize it, then  
if you used a paper, either *eat it* or chew it until it is an homogeneous  
blob and then spit it. Repeat this for several days. Your password at the end  
is the *concatenation* of all these 4-character chunks in the order  
generated.


If at some point you get a chunk that is hard to memorize, you can discard it  
and try again. Discarding removes some entropy but I do not think it is  
significant (as a *rule of thumb*: You can choose the “best” of 4 tries  
for any block and lose only 2 bits of entropy; if you do this each block for  
4 blocks, then you still have 88 bits of entropy). To assure that each chunk  
gives the maximum amount of entropy (24 bits) you must commit yourself to use  
whatever is generated, that is, without discarding. I recommend the “best  
of 4” approach: I.e.: Generate 4 chunks each day and memorize the one you  
prefer. The other 3 should be discarded.


Each chunk gives 24 bits of entropy. I recommend to use a 4-chunck long  
password, for 96 bits of entropy. In my opinion, there is no point in a  
longer password; the attacker would simply kidnap you and give you  
amobarbital instead of trying brute force. 5 chunks give 120 bits, which is  
IMO is enough for *any* password that can be trusted to a single person. For  
stronger security requirements, one should instead require N of M good  
passwords to unlock the ICBM and then distribute the individual passwords as  
appropriate.


Regards.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Please recommend a free-software Mercurial hosting service

[marioxcc . MT]

Thanks for your replies.

I know about GNU Savannah and the wait for project approval. I used to be an  
administrator there and did that. I was the only person doing that at that  
time. As I began to have less time, I offered to review one project per each  
project that somebody else reviewed (like the “I donate the same amount you  
donate, so the effect of your donation is double”), yet nobody was  
interested.


GNU Savannah has been practically abandoned since I used to collaborate. The  
main developer of the software (“beuc”) has left and he closed Gna! for  
that reason. The FSF keeps Savannah open but does not given it the proper  
maintenance. They request donations to enlarge their pockets. Money doesn't  
go to the people doing the actual work.


“But it is responsibility of the developer to make sure she is using free  
software licenses.”


Indeed it is his responsibility. Your use of the word “she” here is  
unjustified, as despite this being an undefined person (thus, sexless), most  
programmers are male, and moreover the pronoun in English to refer to both or  
either sex is “he”.


This pandering of all demographic groups seen as “weak” and   
“vulnerable“ for the sake of equality, at the expense of doing reverse  
discrimination to the supposedly “privileged” group (“white male cis  
straight”?) makes me sick.


The people who do this supposedly present themselves as  “stand for  
equality” and “against discrimination”, yet they do exactly what they  
supposedly stand against of, which is discrimination, aggression, and  
dismissal just for the reason of being of sex or race, for example, as you  
did in dismissing male programmers with your usage of “she” (unlike  
“he”, which is generic; this goes back to the time where the meaning of  
“man” independent of the people's sex was common)


The people like you is the reason of why the United States is under a  
cultural collapse right now. I am lucking to not to live there.

[Trisquel-users] Please recommend a free-software Mercurial hosting service

[marioxcc . MT]

Hello.

What service do you recommend to host Mercurial repositories in a  
freedom-respecting way? I note that I am not looking for a suggestion of  
“run X free software in your own computer” (i.e.: self-hosting).


Thanks.

Re: [Trisquel-users] A Liberated Version of Youtube-DL is Almost Here!

[marioxcc . MT]

Hello.

What has been the functionality lost while liberating it? Is Soon.to.be.Free  
the same person as "Grace Past"?

Re: [Trisquel-users] Support Lisa's fundraiser today

[marioxcc . MT]

If I told you that I know a computer programmer and then I told you that he  
has never has touched a computer, nor ever will do, would you believe that he  
is really a programmer?. Of course not. That is utterly absurd. Such is the  
absurdity of saying that Ada Byron was the first programmer.


Recall that at the time of Ada Byron, no computers existed. The first  
computers (I do not mean simple single-purpose calculators like Pascal's  
mechanical calculator, but machines capable of universal computation) were  
built in the 1940s. At the time of Ada Byron, in the 19th century, the  
concept of computing had not even been defined, let alone implemented.


Why is this absurdity perpetuated, that Ada Byron was "the first programmer"?  
Because that is the multiculturalism herd want you to believe to advance  
their anti-men agenda.


They want you to believe that we are all equal, at least in capabilities,  
while in fact we are not. Any reasonable person who takes just glance at the  
names of the most important mathematicians, physicists, the top Go or Chess  
players will realize that virtually all of them are men.


The male sex has demonstrated through history that it is more capable both  
intellectualy and physically than the female sex. And no, it is not a matter  
of being in power (even if there was, it is a demonstration of capability to  
be in that place): why are there are women-only Chess and Go tournaments but  
no important tournaments allows only men to enter? Because when there are no  
sex restrictions, men dominate. Women simply can not match the male  
intellectual capability. Аs for the physical aspect, take a look at the top  
ranks in sports, for example, Olympic records. Not even with anabolic drugs  
can women match the prowess of their male counterparts (although they compete  
separate, the times/distances/etc. can be compared).


This undermines the multiculturalist agenda, for they want no group  
(especially men or white people) to be more successful than the mediocre  
average, and for this, they spread the lie that no group is more capable than  
average.


And therefore the multiculturalists and the so called "feminists" (a nearly  
meaningless word, since nearly everybody interprets it in a different way)  
invented the Ada hoax so that when faced with the reality that the female sex  
is an intellectual failure, they can say "but see, one of us was the first  
programmer!". They find such a relief in this lie, this false "victory" is so  
good for them, that it does not matter for them that it is not true.


"Lisa" is yet another serial liar (in quotes because being such a liar I can  
not even assume he's telling the truth about his real name). He lied in his  
work: He raised 2 false accusations, first from harassment, and then from  
unjustified hiring; he lies about his sex. Lisa is a professional lier who  
takes advantage of his "marginalized minority" status to play the victim role  
for personal profit. His newest trick is to beg for money supposedly to pay a  
quack to mutilate his genitals into a deep injury that struggles to close  
itself. Probably he pretends to call this injury a "vagina" and prevent it  
from closing by introducing foreign objects on it. Probably he just says he  
is trans for the attention and victim status, although only he knows for  
sure. You can see from the photos he does not even make a serious attempt to  
look as a woman.


I helped a friend when he needed it who has a feminine appearance despite  
being male. She/he is not a liar. She is sincere that has this appearance  
because he likes the look of women as a straight male and has decided to  
embody his standard of beauty himself. He does not pretend to be "a woman  
born as a man", nor does he mutilate his genitals or any other such nosense  
that Lisa does. Fortunately the situation resolved favorably in my friend's  
case. I remind SuperTramp83 that he owes a public apology to my friend for  
spreading harmful speculation about him. On the other hand, I would not help  
Lisa, and not for his looks, but because he has made lying and victimhood his  
modus vivendi.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Talos' fund raiser didn't succeed

[marioxcc . MT]

Although I am not sure, probably it can not be used with a fully free system  
because FPGAs require proprietary software to program.


Talking about fundraising, I have made a web site for the fundraising  
campaign of a friend who needs help to pay for his legal defense from a  
mistaken accusation. Please donate! Bitcoin address:  
1MCTLYKSAmBSjk8Tg32YcaUF9bKifHVA6N

Re: [Trisquel-users] grub bootloader trick doesn't work

[marioxcc . MT]

I use "xbacklight" to change the amplification of my screen.

I have the following code in my ".bashrc" file:

function light () {
if [ $# == 1 ]; then
xbacklight -steps 1 -set $1
elif [ $# == 0 ]; then
xbacklight
fi
}

Re: [Trisquel-users] Install trisquel 7 64bit on 40gb partition

[marioxcc . MT]

Why do not you simply follow the normal procedure for installation?.

40 GB (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) is more than enough. I typically install  
my virtual machines with Debian and LXDE in 10 GB virtual disks and there is  
plenty of space left.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Use this bash init script snippet to get an improved prompt. Also can you donate to help us to get a friend out of jail?

[marioxcc . MT]

We have less than 24 hours to collect the required amount for Alina's legal  
defense. The trial will be on 2 March 2017 (time of Moscow, UTC+3) but we  
must have the money ready before that, taking into account the time it takes  
to exchange.


Now we can receive PayPal donations (send to the e-mail d...@dmxt.org). We  
still receive Bitcoin donations (address:  
1MCTLYKSAmBSjk8Tg32YcaUF9bKifHVA6N). Bitcoin donations are immediately made  
public and transparent in this or any other blockchain explorer.


The campaign has been partially sucessful with some donations, but a small  
fraction is still needed. Please donate and make the difference!

Re: [Trisquel-users] Icecat signing key

[marioxcc . MT]

Did you try "gpg --recv-keys 33C66596 --server SOME_SERVER"?

Re: [Trisquel-users] Use this bash init script snippet to get an improved prompt. Also can you donate to help us to get a friend out of jail?

[marioxcc . MT]

>This is going nowhere fast.

It is!. We have until (and up to) 28 February 2017 to collect the required  
money for my friend's defense, because her trial will be very soon. It is  
less than one week away, which is good because he will be finally free, but  
not if we can not afford a decent defense.


I have no intention to pick fights, but I will not remain silent while  
SuperTramp83 or anybody else tries to spreads slander about my friend  
lowering the chances that somebody more will donate because of the doubt that  
his misinformation provokes into other fellow users, like you.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Use this bash init script snippet to get an improved prompt. Also can you donate to help us to get a friend out of jail?

[marioxcc . MT]

So, to recap:

You skimmed through Alina's fundraising page, and concluded that there is a  
"lack of transparency" because you missed the statement where it is explained  
what he is accused of doing, while at the same time assuming that he is  
gullible without proof.


Then you read a news article according to which my friend is accused of  
amphetamine possession, and you post here claiming that the accusation is for  
methamphetamine possession which is a different compound (not a trivial  
difference, because while amphetamine is safe and therefore used  
therapeutically, metamphetamine is harmful in its primary use).


Now again you show your functional illiteracy. My friend never "exploded a  
coffee". I should note that nowhere does the article that you linked, which  
is from 8 years ago, says that the coffee "exploded" or even that anybody was  
hurt. That my friend may have played a teenager's practical joke which people  
made a big fuss about, is a different matter.


Sputnik News made it up that my friend is rich along with the term "Golden  
Youth". If you make a search for it, you will see that basically only this  
Sputnik News article mentions this term. It is not used, or at least not in  
Russia.


>why are you so keen on supporting Alina, other than "they are my friend"

Well, if helping a friend because he is a friend is not enough of a reason  
for you, then I am sorry for your friends! I on my part am not indifferent to  
my friends problems and I need no more of a reason to help them than  
friendship.


>she SHOULD be in a jail, like **everyone** else who commits illegalities

I remind you that here you accused my friend of committing a crime without  
proof. And you owe Alina and me a public apology for this and a retraction of  
your words.


I do not know you do it where you live, but in Russia, people is not trialed  
by linking to popular newsletters but by evidence. That is the job of an  
attorney in law. We do not have enough money to pay for what they charge, and  
that is why I came here to as for help.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Use this bash init script snippet to get an improved prompt. Also can you donate to help us to get a friend out of jail?

[marioxcc . MT]

>Mario, I did read it, in fact I've read it twice.

What you think that the page and the news article say is not at all what they  
say. If you have read the page twice and you couldn't understand it properly,  
then I am afraid that you are functionally illiterate.


>Metamphetamine

The charge that my friend Alina is accused of, is related to amphetamine not  
methamphetamine, nor driving with a false license. These are different  
compounds with different effects.


Amphetamine is considered benign, to the point that is medically prescribed  
to children and adults for narcolepsy and attention deficit. Methamphetamine  
on the other hand, is mostly used recreationally and is known to damage  
dopaminergic neurons, although it is occasionally used in medical practices  
in very severe cases where amphetamine is not effective.


>The intro of your website talks about bigotry and human stupidity, the fear  
of the diverse etc etc,


The web page of the fundraising campaign says exactly what the facts are,  
that Alina faced obstacles and the scorn of people, and then it describes as  
an example the problems he faced when he married. Nowhere does the web page  
call anybody "stupid" or "bigot". It also says what Alina is accused of, and  
that we are confident that we can prove his innocence.


>but she SHOULD be in a jail, like **everyone** else who commits  
illegalities, she should serve the time in accordance to the violation of the  
legal code.


Here you are assuming that my friend Alina committed the crime that he is  
accused for. Given that you are so keen on proofs, where is your evidence  
that he committed this crime?.


My friend Alina is in jail awaiting for his trial. The reason we are asking  
for money is because we can prove that he is innocent, but my friend's family  
can't afford the attorney feeds, even after we, his friends, have contributed  
with money already.


It also surprises me that you place so much faith in the moral of the legal  
system. You are saying that if the bureaucrats that make laws that say that  
something is wrong, then it is wrong. It is thus only fair that once my fried  
Alina is exonerated you admit that you were wrong.


You owe me and my friend Alina a public apology for claiming that he is guilt  
without proof, and I will remind you of it when he is exonerated.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Use this bash init script snippet to get an improved prompt. Also can you donate to help us to get a friend out of jail?

[marioxcc . MT]

"In 2016, Alina Davis was abusively and unfairly accused of drugs possession.  
[...] We are confident that we can prove Alina's innocence. The obstacle is  
that her legal defense will cost 40,000 Russian rubles (690 United States  
dollars)."


The page is very clear and there is no lack of transparency. The above quote  
is what the page says since it was created. Maybe you both did not read it.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Use this bash init script snippet to get an improved prompt. Also can you donate to help us to get a friend out of jail?

[marioxcc . MT]

# Copyright (c) 2017 Mario Castelán Castro
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see .

function set_color () {
local RED GREEN CYAN END_COLOR
RED="$(tput setaf 1)" &&
GREEN="$(tput setaf 2)" &&
CYAN="$(tput setaf 6)" &&
END_COLOR="$(tput sgr0)"

if [ $? != 0 ]; then
local PRINT_EXIT_STATUS=\
"\$(E=\$?
if [ \$E == 0 ]; then
echo \"[\$E]\"
else
echo \"*\$E*\"
fi )"
PS1="\u@\h $PRINT_EXIT_STATUS [\$PWD]\n\\$ "
else
if [ $(id -u) == 0 ]; then
local USER_COLOR="$RED"
else
local USER_COLOR="$GREEN"
fi
local HOST_COLOR="$CYAN"
local PRINT_EXIT_STATUS=\
"\$(E=\$?
if [ \$E == 0 ]; then
echo \"\[$GREEN\][\$E]\[$END_COLOR\]\"
else
echo \"\[$RED\][\$E]\[$END_COLOR\]\"
fi)"
PS1="\[$USER_COLOR\]\u\[$END_COLOR\]\[$HOST_COLOR\]@\h\[$END_COLOR\]  
$PRINT_EXIT_STATUS  
\[$HOST_COLOR\][\$PWD]\[$END_COLOR\]\n\\[$USER_COLOR\]\\$\[$END_COLOR\] "

PS2="\[$USER_COLOR\]>\[$END_COLOR\] "
fi
}

set_color

The attachment seems to be broken, so I have posted the snippet above.

[Trisquel-users] Use this bash init script snippet to get an improved prompt. Also can you donate to help us to get a friend out of jail?

[marioxcc . MT]

Hello fellow free software users!. I want to share with you a small snippet  
that I have in my .bashrc to make a custom prompt, as you can see in the  
attached image. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3  
or any later and you will find it attached to this post. Note that the exit  
status code of the previous command is displayed between the host name and  
the path.


I am also writing to ask for your help to raise funds for the legal defense  
of a friend who is currently in jail. He is known as Alina Davis among  
Russian users for his sometimes feminine and sometimes androgynous appearance  
and sense of fashion You can find information about Alina and how to help in  
this web site. Please help by donating, and also by linking to our  
fund-raising web site from your social media accounts. For those of you who  
use Facebook or Twitter, please help us by linking to Alina's fund raising  
web site from those social networks, especially among those groups that may  
sympathize with Alina's situation. Thanks.



# Copyright (c) 2017 Mario Castelán Castro
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see .

function set_color () {
local RED GREEN CYAN END_COLOR
RED="$(tput setaf 1)" &&
GREEN="$(tput setaf 2)" &&
CYAN="$(tput setaf 6)" &&
END_COLOR="$(tput sgr0)"

if [ $? != 0 ]; then
local PRINT_EXIT_STATUS=\
"\$(E=\$?
if [ \$E == 0 ]; then
echo \"[\$E]\"
else
echo \"*\$E*\"
fi )"
PS1="\u@\h $PRINT_EXIT_STATUS [\$PWD]\n\\$ "
else
if [ $(id -u) == 0 ]; then
local USER_COLOR="$RED"
else
local USER_COLOR="$GREEN"
fi
local HOST_COLOR="$CYAN"
local PRINT_EXIT_STATUS=\
"\$(E=\$?
if [ \$E == 0 ]; then
echo \"\[$GREEN\][\$E]\[$END_COLOR\]\"
else
echo \"\[$RED\][\$E]\[$END_COLOR\]\"
fi)"
PS1="\[$USER_COLOR\]\u\[$END_COLOR\]\[$HOST_COLOR\]@\h\[$END_COLOR\] $PRINT_EXIT_STATUS \[$HOST_COLOR\][\$PWD]\[$END_COLOR\]\n\\[$USER_COLOR\]\\$\[$END_COLOR\] "
PS2="\[$USER_COLOR\]>\[$END_COLOR\] "
fi
}

set_color

Re: [Trisquel-users] What *academic* search engine do you recommend?.

[marioxcc . MT]

Thanks for replying pizzaiolo, but those are not search engines.

[Trisquel-users] What *academic* search engine do you recommend?.

[marioxcc . MT]

Hello. I am looking for a general purpose academic search engine. I want to  
avoid Google Scholar because of the well known evils of Google (mainly  
tracking). For the field of human biology I use PubMed and it works as  
expected, but its scope is limited. I see that there are many academic search  
engines apart from G. S. and I don't know which one to use. If you frequently  
consult the academic literature, which academic search engine do you use?.


Thanks in advance.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Free programs to play Go (Baduk/Weiqi/Igo)

[marioxcc . MT]

Do you know about any other programs that I have missed?. Thanks.

[Trisquel-users] Free programs to play Go (Baduk/Weiqi/Igo)

[marioxcc . MT]

Hello.

What free software programs exist for playing the game of Go (engines, SGF  
editors, and Go server clients) that are actively maintained or at least  
usable?.


As for engines, I know of Pachi and Michi.

As for clients, I know of qGo. Another client, CGoban 1 has been long  
unmaintained; the last version is from 2002.


There is also goGui which has been unmaintained since 2013.

Regards.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Is there a way to post to Reddit without enabling its JavaScript?

[marioxcc . MT]

I will let you (generic "you") know if RTV works. I'm planning to try it in a  
Debian 8 virtual machine (but I don't guarantee it). As a good practice, I  
run small single-author programs like this in a virtual machine to protect  
from security flaws and intentionally malicious code.


As for reading folded comments, I found a workaround: Select the link "See  
more comments", see the source code for the selection, and then copy and  
paste the anchor into the address bar.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Is there a way to post to Reddit without enabling its JavaScript?

[marioxcc . MT]

At a glance, RTV seems like a workable option but I have yet to download and  
try to use it. Thanks hack and hack.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Is there a way to post to Reddit without enabling its JavaScript?

[marioxcc . MT]

>AFAIK the JS is free, just not compliant with LibreJS.

I'm not sure. I checked the HTML source code and found no Copyright notice. I  
did not check Reddit's source code. In any case, I know that it calls  
Google's JavaScript which is almost surely non-free (I used to enable JS for  
Reddit).


In any case, do you know if is there a way to make posting work properly, or  
at least work around it without enabling JavaScript?.

[Trisquel-users] Is there a way to post to Reddit without enabling its JavaScript?

[marioxcc . MT]

Hello.

My quesiton is the one in the title. When I use Reddit I use it without  
enabling JavaScript and I have noticed that it works partially. I can browse  
and register, but I can't post. Is there a way to post without using Reddit's  
proprietary JavaScript?.


Thanks in advance.

Re: [Trisquel-users] diffence in mac and ip?

[marioxcc . MT]

i know ip is the acesss point to the internet and mac is computer id. but  
that is all i know.


No, you think you know that, but your description is outright wrong. If you  
thought you know that, then you are using a bad source of information or you  
are misinterpreting it and reaching wrong conclusions.


When somebody says MAC or IP he usually means MAC address or IP  
address. Both are addresses (that is, identifiers), the difference is that  
they are addresses at different levels of abstraction. Referenced to the  
TCP/IP model (use a search engine for details): IP addresses belong to the IP  
protocol and operate at the Internet layer; MAC addresses belong to the link  
level (for example, Ethernet). IP addresses identify the source and  
destination of a packet as it travels through Internet (but NAT can rewrite  
either address). MAC addresses identify the source and destination of a link  
level frame (and the IP packet it contains) only within a link segment (for  
example, only within an Ethernet segment).


The first hop in the connection to your computer to the Internet backbone is  
likely a Ethernet or IEEE 802.11 link. If that is the case, all devices  
within that network have a MAC address.


When a host sends a packet or a router receivers a packet to forward, it must  
send the packet using the link layer, but the link layer is usually unaware  
of IP addresses; it must forward the packet using a MAC address (the MAC  
address of the next hop router or host). The relation between MAC addresses  
and IP addresses is usually handled by ARP (address resolution protocol). You  
can see the ARP table of your computer using the “arp -n” command as  
root.


Here is an example: Suppose you connect to the Internet using Ethernet or  
IEEE 802.11. When you try to open, say, “example.org” using your browser,  
your computer first resolves the host name into an IP addresses using DNS  
(for that, it already needs to use IP), then resolves that IP addresses into  
a MAC address using ARP, then it exchanges information with the server using  
HTTP on top of TCP/IP on top of Ethernet. The IP packets from your computer  
to the server have the IP address of the server as the destination and are at  
first contained within an Ethernet frame, whose destination address is the  
MAC address of your home router or modem (note that the destinations are  
different).


The home router or modem receives the Ethernet frame. The Ethernet framing is  
discarded; the IP packet is kept and is forwarded to the next hop using the  
link-level framing and possibly MAC address that matches the outgoing  
connection from your home. For example, if the outgoing connection is a  
coaxial link, it is likely that the corresponding physical and link-level  
protocol is DOCSIS, if it is a telephone link, then the corresponding  
protocol must be a type of DSL. At that point, the link level framing and MAC  
addresses of your computer and router are already irrelevant for that IP  
packet as those MAC addresses are only relevant within your home network, but  
the IP addresses of your computer and the destination server are used to  
forward the packet correctly until it reaches its destination.


All communication within the Internet use IP and therefore IP addresses. On  
the other hand, not all link level protocols use MAC addresses. For example,  
PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) doesn't uses MAC addresses.


You can and should search for more information in the Internet. Computer  
networking is complex. It should not be taken lightly if you will use it to  
deploy a production system; you must learn the relevant part throughly (it is  
not possible to learn it all). It is much better to learn from a book than to  
learn from sparse information alone (tutorials, manuals, and so on). You can  
use both a book and sparse information. There is The TCP/IP Guide which is  
available online at no cost. If you are really interested in networking, then  
read that book or a book similar to that one.


It seems to me like you need much more knowledge before deploying a server.  
If you only want to learn, you can obtain the same experience using a virtual  
machine in your own computer.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Is this laptop model (HP 240) compatible with free software?

[marioxcc . MT]

I noted that one option is given that the laptop comes with Ubuntu, but  
Ubuntu includes proprietary controllers and firmware.


Therefore I do not know if it would work with Linux-libre given that it seems  
to work with Ubuntu. It is not mentioned in the specifications whether it  
requires the proprietary firmware package.

[Trisquel-users] Is this laptop model (HP 240) compatible with free software?

[marioxcc . MT]

Is the HP 240 laptop with CPU Intel Celeron N2840 compatible with free  
software (see the specifications)?


There is not much useful information in the specifications. I was especially  
interested in the wireless chip model to check for compatibility, but only  
the manufacturer is mentioned (and there are several options, I do not know  
which one is actually used). How can I check online that the integrated  
graphics controller, sound controller, and so on will work?. I tried h-node,  
but there are no reports for the CPU or the whole laptop and there is no  
model number to search for regarding the wireless controller.


I noted that one option is given that the laptop comes with Ubuntu, but  
Ubuntu includes proprietary controllers and firmware.


Regards.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Is this laptop model (HP 240) compatible with free software?

[marioxcc . MT]

Indeed, but I do not have physical (or otherwise) access to the laptop.  
Furthermore, the specification paper describes several options and it is not  
described which ones of those applies.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Is this laptop model (HP 240) compatible with free software?

[marioxcc . MT]

I do not think that it matters as for compatibility and I do not want to give  
free publicity to the shop.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Is this laptop model (HP 240) compatible with free software?

[marioxcc . MT]

I an Mexican an I live in Mexico, and I couldn't buy from that shop. Thanks  
for the suggestion nonetheless. Online shops are of no use in my particular  
case; I am only asking for help regarding whether this computer will work  
with free software.


There are really very few computer hardware vendors that are worth promoting  
like Gluglug/Minifree and Thinkpenguin. The local shops here are no  
exception, they are not interested in the free software philosophy in the  
least.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Is this Librem13 fully free this time?

[marioxcc . MT]

I see.

And even after all that we still don't have any solution for the future.  
Lets says two or three years from now. Unfortunately there are a lot of  
things that need funding like this (be it reverse engineering or cleaning up  
code for release or design work / manufacturing), cooperation of huge  
entities, and so on, but we also need people interested in and capable of  
working on these things.


Maybe it is feasible to make free software friendly wireless NICs for the new  
technologies in a small scale. “Crowdfounding” may be used to provide  
funding to a team that is concerned with the free software ethics.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Is this Librem13 fully free this time?

[marioxcc . MT]

2. We had free software friendly wifi chips and now we don't have any

I thought that your company ThinkPenguin is selling some. Do you mean that  
free software friendly NICs are no longer being manufactured?.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Advertising Trisquel FLOSS

[marioxcc . MT]

What software did you use to make the PDF?.

Re: [Trisquel-users] The FSF's statement on Windows 10

[marioxcc . MT]

If you are attempting to use software that will hand control over your  
computer to its developer then you have a bigger problem thereof than whether  
it “breaks”.

Re: [Trisquel-users] returned to trisquel7

[marioxcc . MT]

all this talk about licensing is why i stopped going in the #gnu room on  
irc. I'm not interested.


Then according to your own interests, you should stop “going here” as  
well, because you will find mostly the same attitude regarding licensing. If  
you can't grasp the importance of licensing, then #gnu is no worser without  
you.


But I still feel more secure using windows, which I use for gaming, then I  
do gnu/linux.


Then use it if you judge it apropriate. You can find plenty of arguments and  
evidence to the contrary using a search engine. We (free software enthusiast,  
security researchers, plain users, and so) sometimes post our experience and  
the inferences made thereof in the hope it is useful, but hardly anybody is  
going to try to fix your reasoning if you do not want to listen.


Also, you should learn the meaning of the words you use before you use them.  
Here you should have used “than”, not “then”.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Forex Trading Platform.

[marioxcc . MT]

There may be local (non-web) clients to trade Bitcoin which are free as in  
freedom. If your FOREX trading platform has a public API, then you can  
develop or hire a developer to write a free software client; you may use one  
such Bitcoin trading client as the starting point.

Re: [Trisquel-users] How do i become Root on Trisquel Mini?!

[marioxcc . MT]

When i click on Synaptic in the Preferences menu, nothing happens. The menu  
disappears but i don't even hear any CPU activity.


That seems like a bug. I think it should ask for your password. Consider  
filling a bug report.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Is this Librem13 fully free this time?

[marioxcc . MT]

That implies that the FSF associated itself with a site that runs proprietary  
spyware on the browsers of uninformed users (or users who want to run it). I  
am referring to the fact that most web users don't block JavaScript with  
NoScript or similar.


Maybe you are misinterpreting a statement form the FSF saying that they like  
CrowdSupply to mean that they are business associates. You may want to  
clarify this.


Apart from the fact that they intend to run this spyware, is it possible to  
access the site full functionality without running its JavaScript?.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Is this Librem13 fully free this time?

[marioxcc . MT]

We ARE NOT THERE YET. But are very interested in anybody willing to help  
advance this area forward.


Rather than bashing those trying to solve the impossible maybe we can work  
together to free it!


If you promised a fully free system, the responsibility to deliver it lies  
entirely in you, not the critics, and if you are unable to do so, then it is  
your fault and the critics were right. Why should anyone else be responsible  
to help you deliver what you promised and already charged for?.


Also, despite the fascination of society with quotes, the fact that an  
assertion from a known figure is formatted as a “quote” doesn't makes it  
any more valid, and often it makes it less valid, because it is taken out of  
context. Clearly you are trying to appeal to emotions so that we will ignore  
reason (thus committing a fallacy), but it is not going to work.


Chris, from ThinkPenguin, who thinks we're a competitor to his revenue.  
He/They have motive to spread slanderous comments about me personally, and  
Purism.


That is a fallacy known as attacking the man (“argumentum ad hominem”).  
If Chris has spread any actual slanderous comment (a falsehood), then please  
quote him and show us how he is wrong with actual evidence. For example, you  
can show us your progress in liberating the already mentioned proprietary  
technologies that you already commited to free. Maybe you already freed some  
of those things. That would prove that in fact, it can be done.

Re: [Trisquel-users] I wish to buy Lemote Yeeloong 8101B notebook

[marioxcc . MT]

I do not know where to get one, but maybe you are interested in buying a  
Gluglug Libreboot X200, which as far as I know, is the more freedom  
respecting computer model available (see the link; I do not sell them).

Re: [Trisquel-users] Rejected games list

[marioxcc . MT]

You already identified another word that isn't so easily confused with work  
[1], so there is no point in changing my message since you can do it  
mentally. I intentionally used the same word for [1] and [3] with annotations  
(the ones between square brackets) so as to make it clear that the word  
“work” has at least 2 relevant meanings here, and how it easily leads to  
the fallacy of conflating information with its physical representation when  
not distinguished.


In any case, I see that notwithstanding my argument to the contrary, you  
insist in conflating information (a work [1], in the terminology above) with  
its physical representation [2], as you showed with your example of a couch.  
When arguments or messages are ignored or can't be understood by one of the  
speakers it is of no use to continue discussing, therefore I will not. I  
leave it to you to find the mistakes in your reasoning if you are interested  
in doing so.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Rejected games list

[marioxcc . MT]

This is misleading. Debian “main” repository includes software which is  
proprietary (according to the FSF) including some under the Artistic License  
1.0. Therefore not all software from Debian main “is definitely ok” in  
the sense of being suitable for a fully free distribution that uses the GNU  
FSDG, like Trisquel.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Rejected games list

[marioxcc . MT]

danieru: You are conflating 3 separate concepts: [1] the abstract concept of  
a work, like “The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha”, [2] its  
physical representation (an exemplar of this work as found in most libraries)  
and [3] “work” as the action of making effort to build something (as in  
“it took Cervantes work to write Don Quixote”). In the same confusion,  
you are also conflating physical property with intellectual property. This is  
exactly the confusion that information (software, music, movies and similar)  
monopolies want people to make; they are spreading this confusion when they  
speak of “piracy” and “stealing”. I have marked in this message  
usages of these concepts to make it clear.


So because you can easily make copies then the value of my work is 0?

I quote this as an example of the aforesaid conflation. Here onpon isn't  
saying that your work [1] is worthless, but that a copy [3] of your work [1]  
has almost zero monetary value since in the digital age it is extremely easy  
to copy information when not encumbered by DRM.


The argument of onpon is that the owner of a copy [2] of a work [1] should be  
able to use his copy according to his discretion; this includes making a  
reproduction of this copy and selling it.


When you put work [3] into making a work [1] and then somebody distributes  
copies [2] your work [1] without your authorization, they are not stealing or  
selling your work [3] (that is the fallacy behind the term “piracy”). You  
only have done as much work [3] as you wanted, and making copies of the  
product of that work [3], that is it, the work [2] does not entails a cost  
for you. You may be able to profit by first using law to make illegal for  
people to make physical copies of that work [1], then act as the sole  
provider of copies [2] for that work [1] and charge a fee, or sell the right  
to make those copies [2] to third parties (to a publisher if it is a book).  
However, it is a fallacy to conclude that somebody is stealing anything from  
you by producing copies [2] of your work [1] by his own means (bypassing your  
attempt to establish a monopoly), because he is not consuming anything from  
you or forcing you to make more work [1] that what you have already did by  
your own will.


A separate argument may be made on whether the artificial monopolies that  
Copyright grants (and the implied restriction of our ability to make copies  
of works without depending on the author) may be justified on the grounds  
that it provides a means to found production of works [2] in a capitalist  
economy. It is a mistake to think that Copyright exists or try to justify it  
because it enable authors to profit; that is backwards reasoning. By a  
similar reasoning we could try to “justify” an hypothetical law to forbid  
people to prepare their own food so that restaurants will profit more,  
because that way restaurants will profit more, then claim that allowing  
people to prepare food is stealing from the restaurants.

Re: [Trisquel-users] How to shut up Windows users

[marioxcc . MT]

I did not read carefully the thread you linked because it seems worthless,  
but I have an idea of what the problem is: You are trying to educate the  
users of an informatics forum about about free software. It is a noble task,  
but it is unlikely that you will succeed and there are better uses for your  
time.


The forum seems quite worthless. It seems to be full of people who are  
enthusiastic about the most superficial part of informatics, but have no  
interest or knowledge in informatics as an engineering. This is the  
equivalent of “science fiction” fans who are fascinated by flashing  
“science fiction” movies, and think they know about physics, while in  
fact what they think they know about physics is simply false or too vague to  
be of any use, and have not the least interest in physics. These groups  
(among many others) are a sign of the intellectual decadence of society. It  
is a waste of time to discuss informatics with the people of this forum, just  
as it is a waste of time to discuss physics with the aforementioned type of  
“science fiction” fans.


 How to make better use of your time to advance free software: Talk about the  
problems of proprietary software and how free software provides a solution to  
the people with whom you interact regularly (friends, familiars, coworkers),  
but do not waste time and effort trying to convince those who do not want to  
listen. In addition, use free software in public, so that your software will  
get people attention. When somebody asks you about your software, take the  
opportunity to educate him about free software and (at your option) offer to  
install GNU/Linux on his computer.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Is Trisquel the right libre-free OS for me?

[marioxcc . MT]

Hello and welcome.

Linux is a kernel. Most people unfortunately call the OS just “Linux” but  
this is a mistake which some intentionally make and spread. We call it  
“GNU/Linux” to attribute the GNU project which started the free software  
movement, is the first project to build towards a fully free operating system  
and it is (specifically, GNU software) a big part of modern GNU/Linux  
distributions. Not only free software wouldn't exist without GNU, it is built  
around the principles that GNU started (the freedom to use, study, modify and  
redistribute) and with many tools that are part of it (including GCC,  
Coreutils, Autotools, Emacs).


I think that Trisquel fulfills your requirements. However. any typical  
GNU/Linux distribution is suitable for learning how it works and for  
programming (but only a few provide exclusively free software); they all  
provide close to the same functionality; only policy (such as including free  
software only), release cycle, user base size and its attitude, and default  
configuration vary significantly. What software you use for programming, and  
how you learn how the system works will make a much bigger difference.


Most of the documentation for Debian and Ubuntu is applicable to Trisquel,  
because it is derived from Ubuntu. The Debian Reference provides an  
acceptable overview of how the system works (I do not recommend reading it  
sequentially, use it as a reference instead, as its title says).

Re: [Trisquel-users] bypass uk school censorship

[marioxcc . MT]

When accessing remote servers (not in the same LAN) the latency is usually so  
high that remote graphical programms are unusable.


I recommend setting up a VPS server in your server and route all of your  
traffic through it when you are in school. If a plain VPN connection doesn't  
work because it is blocked, try tunneling the VPN connection through  
httptunnel.


However, bear in mind that you may have problems with school authorities if  
they discover you are bypassing the filter. Consider the risks and benefits  
before bypassing the filter.

Re: [Trisquel-users] How to create a mail server?

[marioxcc . MT]

Do you find that it is too hard or too much work to enter your query into a  
search engine?. You would have found links like the ones the people provided,  
but faster and without wasting their time.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Osmo has suddenly stopped running.

[marioxcc . MT]

I have not used Osmo, but what you describe appears to be a bug or very bad  
practice from the developers.


In C and C++ assertions are a feature intended to be used for internal  
consistency checks (those that depend only in the program and not in its  
environment). Sometimes they are used for external consistency checks, like  
checking that a required file exists. This is incorrect. It is also very bad  
practice because when the assertion fails it terminates the program suddenly  
and gives no information for troubleshooting which is exactly what is  
happening here.


If you changed something relevant, as a workaround try undoing it and try to  
run Osmo again. You can also try compiling and installing the latest version  
of gtkspell manually and instructing Osmo to use it. Maybe the bug has  
already been fixed in the latest version; otherwise, report the bug to the  
developers of Osmo.

Re: [Trisquel-users] ar9285 free software hardware?

[marioxcc . MT]

By “free software hardware” do you mean hardware whose full functionality  
can be accessed with free software[1], or something else?


[1]: Do not confuse it with “free hardware”, that is, hardware whose  
design is free to use, modify and distribute.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Inactive swap partition

[marioxcc . MT]

That will cause problems if devices are renumbered, which may happen if one  
adds or removes hard disks.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Group chat

[marioxcc . MT]

“server software should have something implemented that functions like the  
groupbot”


It is already done that way: most (or at least a big proportion) IRC and XMPP  
servers accept TLS connections from clients. What benefit does your proposal  
offers over this?. What problem do you attempt to address with your  
proposal?.


If you do not know how the existing technology works, it makes no sense to  
think of how to improve it; instead learn how it works, and then you may have  
meaningful ideas on how to improve it. Anyway, it is likely that all of those  
ideas are obvious to the ones capable of implement them, several times.  
Having ideas on how to improve software is the easy part. The hard part is to  
implement those ideas in software and that they become widespread.

Re: [Trisquel-users] MonoDevelop fails to start

[marioxcc . MT]

I suggest reporting it as a bug.

Re: [Trisquel-users] New free user

[marioxcc . MT]

Hello and welcome!.

Do not hesitate to ask here about what you can not readily find using search  
engines that is related to Trisquel or the free software philosophy.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Security Enhanced Linux Kernel? Eh? What's going on here? O.o!

[marioxcc . MT]

But no distribution audits all of the software it bundles (and even if they  
did, it is likely that several vulnerabilities go undetected); in specific,  
Ubuntu and Debian don't. For discovering vulnerabilities distributions mostly  
rely on public discoveries. Debian mentions the name of the discoverer of  
vulnerabilities in announces in the read only mailing list  
“debian-security-annou...@lists.debian.org”.


In one occasion, Debian introduced a vulnerability, possibly accidentally, it  
was discovered and fixed. There have been vulnerabilities which have remained  
undiscovered for years like CVE-2014-6271 (use a search engine for more  
information).

Re: [Trisquel-users] Could systemd be an inconvenient on portability?

[marioxcc . MT]

Systemd as an init maybe not for the time being. But I meant to systemd as  
any of it's components (that can become a dependency), like logind or udev.


I commented about system specific features and software in my first reply.

I completely agree with the first sentence, GNU should always have freedom  
as the first priority. But GNU also has compatibly between *nix systems as a  
nice and desirable thing to have, although not a critical requirement of  
course. I don't agree with it is usually good to have. Why usually? Are  
there situations where portability isn't good to have?


Yes, in some cases it is better to not to have portability. When there is a  
piece of free software that has no proprietary counterpart, or is by far  
technically superior to that technical counterpart, then it is usually better  
that it runs only on a fully free operating system so that is not portable.  
This adds a practical reason for people to use the free operating system.  
There is some rough similarity to the effect of Copyleft licenses. Copyleft  
licenses directly give an incentive to develop free software, while in this  
case, absence of portability just gives a reason to use free software, but as  
I explain next, this still results in a similar benefit to that of Copyleft.


The benefit in this case is not in making people who don't care about freedom  
of computing use free software because it is more convenient, but in that  
this increased usage may result in the free OS be more widely used instead of  
proprietary OSs and in turn this reduces the founding and pressure of  
proprietary software and promotes development and further adoption of the  
free system, which benefits those who we support the free software philosophy  
and may lead more people to know about the problems of proprietary software  
and centralization, and adopt the free software philosophy. Many of us became  
aware of the free software philosophy through using GNU/Linux and initially  
not knowing about GNU or free software.


However, it seems than more often, it is better that free software works on  
the popular proprietary operating systems to ease transition from those OSs  
to a fully free one, and also because it may reduce the usage of proprietary  
software in those proprietary OSs in favor of free software, with the  
benefits mentioned above.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Could systemd be an inconvenient on portability?

[marioxcc . MT]

But hey, if you want to talk about non-portable dependencies, how about X?  
You know, the window system most commonly used for the last ~30 years.  
Seriously, it's exactly the same deal.


The X library is not any more portable than systemd: it only works with X.

Most of the time, when “portability” is mentioned in the context of  
informatics, it means the property of a software that runs on several  
operating systems. The X Windows System is portable: it runs in several  
operating systems, so depending on X doesn't makes a program unportable.  
SystemD is not portable, it only runs on operating systems that use Linux as  
the kernel, so it is not comparable in this redgard.


The X library only works with the X Windows System because it is a component  
of the X Windows System and the X Windows System is portable between  
operating systems, which is the topic of this thread and not portability in  
general (which is vaguely defined anyway).

Re: [Trisquel-users] Could systemd be an inconvenient on portability?

[marioxcc . MT]

Is systemd going to be an obstacle when people want to port applications to  
GNU Hurd or other Unix-like systems?


I suppose you mean “programs”. See my comment about the word  
“application”.


We have always had system-specific features and programs and they are by  
themselves not an obstacle to portability, but it is an obstacle to  
portability when other programs require these features or depend on these  
programs (instead of having them as a so called “optional dependency”).


For instance, using systemd to start an UNIX service (for instance the HTTP  
server lighttpd) is not an obstacle to portability, We can readily use  
System‐V style init or Upstart in another system (which may be just another  
installation of the same distribution, a different distribution, or a  
different operating system). It would be an obstacle to portability if  
lighttpd did not work without systemd.


Do you know any other inconveniences of systemd?

I can not comment on the vices and virtues of systemd, but there is plenty of  
discussion in the web.

Re: [Trisquel-users] New Intel graphics will require non-free firmware

[marioxcc . MT]

x86 and ARM are instruction set architectures (the format and semantics  
allowed for machine code). 32 bits or 64 bits in this context refers to the  
“word width”; the size in bits of the general purpose registers and  
usually also of the RAM addresses. Both ARM and x86 have 32 bits and 64 bits  
versions, but they differ in more than the word width. Most laptop and  
desktop computers use x86‐64 CPUs (Also called “AMD64”, “EM64T”,  
“Intel 64” and incorrectly, “x64”).

Re: [Trisquel-users] New Intel graphics will require non-free firmware

[marioxcc . MT]

x86 and ARM are instruction set architectures (the format and semantics  
allowed for machine code). 32 bits or 64 bits in this context refers to the  
“word width”: the size in bits of the general purpose registers which is  
usually the same as the size of memory addresses. Both ARM and x86 have 32  
bits and 64 bits versions (and they differ in more than the word width). Most  
laptop and desktop computers use x86‐64 CPUs (Also called “AMD64”,  
“EM64T”, “Intel 64” and incorrectly, “x64”).

Re: [Trisquel-users] Websites that suggest exclusively free addons/plugins.

[marioxcc . MT]

Do you know any other websites which can fit into the context?

Yes, Libregamewiki.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Apple is open sourcing Swift. Your thoughts?

[marioxcc . MT]

The articles don't mention what is going to be open source (a compiler, a  
debugger, an IDE, an implementation of the standard library, or what else?).  
As usual, those who talk about open source don't know what the term means and  
misapply it. Open source is a property that software may possess, but not  
programming languages (they have no source to speak of, implementations do).  
The question should be whether the software is going to be free as in  
freedom.


Article writers in this type of journals are already too sloppy to know what  
open source is, let alone comprehend the importance of free software. These  
article writers don't want to see beyond their nose. When a new digital jail  
is released (traitors devices like computer phones, “iThings” or  
proprietary software) they are quick to appraise it for what it looks like,  
without realizing that it is just another way of putting the general public  
under corporate control. The use I see for any of these journals is to know  
what some of the latest artifices to deceive and exploit customers are.


Apple does occasionally releases software that can be useful in a fully free  
system like CUPS. However, at a glance, this gives me the impression that  
they are just looking to provide an open source bait for any developer stupid  
enough to take it, so that then he develops software that runs within the  
software framework of Apple; then Apple can subjugate the users of that  
software and possibly the stupid developer too.

Re: [Trisquel-users] installing apps with app get?.

[marioxcc . MT]

I see that tomlukeywood has answered the orignal questions, in addition:

It is not “app get”, it's “apt-get”, as you wrote correctly in the  
message body. APT stands for “Advanced Packaging Tool”. “app” is  
ostensibly a shorthand for “application”, but in practice it is a  
marketing trash word (“buzzword”) roughly synonym with “computer  
program”; used especially by proprietary software developers. I guess it's  
also another way of making fun of the ignorant clients who happily surrender  
their computing rights and hand their personal information to them (the  
developers).


We have been using “computer program” for decades and it works perfectly,  
it means what it says. On the other hand, “app” is sloppy language,  
because the speaker doesn't ever bothers to write the full word, which is  
usually incorrect anyway. In informatics, an application is a generic way in  
which technology may be put to use, for instance, the world wide web, e-mail,  
optical character recognition, peer to peer file sharing, and so on are  
applications. Implementations thereof are not applications but computer  
programs.


According to Wikipedia, “app” is a shorthand for “application  
software”, which is such as vague concept so as to be nearly useless (There  
is no clearly boundary between “operating system” and “application  
software” because any one would be arbitrary).

Re: [Trisquel-users] What is pipermail?

[marioxcc . MT]

When you have a doubt, the first thing to do is to use a search engine. If  
you search well and are unable to find anything relevant or pointers to  
further information, then ask. This is better for you because you may answer  
your inquiry faster, and better for the rest because you don't consume  
volunteer's time which is better spent in other tasks.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Cheap servers to buy?

[marioxcc . MT]

“vrms” is misleading, because it is based on the Debian policy, instead  
of GNU policy (and the name makes it seem like so), and as far as I know, it  
just checks whether there are packages installed from the proprietary  
repository section, and you can do the same with any package manager  
interface (like aptitude). For more information, search “vrms” in this  
forum. If you install proprietary software by other means, “vrms” won't  
report it.


Based on the expectations on that package users have expressed in this forum,  
it seems like “vrms” causes more harm than good. It would be better if it  
was discontinued, or clearly labeled as being entirely humorous and not  
informational.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Cheap servers to buy?

[marioxcc . MT]

Specifically, the relevant quantity is the average power consumption with the  
intended workload; in order to determine it, one must make the computer run  
that workload and measure the power consumption. The quantity with units of  
power in the labels of computer power supplies is usually the maximum power  
they can deliver under with all rails loaded to the maximum, and it is not  
representative of the average power consumption under any particular  
conditions.


In other words, using the power rating of the computer is not adequate for  
this purpose.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Trisquel as a server os

[marioxcc . MT]

Should I use the Trisquel net-installer iso?

Yes. I think that the CD images for installing a graphical environment also  
contain the netinstaller, but it doesn't uses the packages already in the CD,  
it downloads them from a mirror. I am not completely sure.


I am assuming there is an option for disabling installation of the desktop  
environment.


Yes, there is.

Also, what web-server should I use?

Web server software is usually very flexible. There is no single server  
software that you “should” use. I have used Nginx which is efficient in  
resource usage and easy to configure using a text configuration file.  
LigHTTPd is also efficient in resource usage, but I do not have experience  
with it. Apparently Apache is harder to configure and much less efficient  
than the other 2 mentioned server software packages.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Cheap servers to buy?

[marioxcc . MT]

You have conflicting requirements: “cheap” and “mega performance”.  
Also: don't forget about freedom: not all computers allow the user to make  
full use of them with a fully free system; you must deliberately make sure  
(or have an high confidence) that the computer you are going to buy runs well  
with a fully free system.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Sites Server and Forum Software?

[marioxcc . MT]

It's better to use nmap locally.

Re: [Trisquel-users] getting an ubuntu notebook and installing debian 8?

[marioxcc . MT]

That is right. However, I want to make clear that I didn't suggest to search  
for “works with Linux” as if it was a magical string (I know that your  
comment doesn't explicitly says that). My suggestion was “research whether  
it works with free software”, and I did not give any specific procedure for  
determining whether the hardware works with free software given the  
documentation or manufacturer web sites (Like searching for claims that it  
“works with Linux” or that the driver is “open source”).

Re: [Trisquel-users] Cheap servers to buy?

[marioxcc . MT]

Servers in the sense of (1) computers marketed as servers should not be  
confused with servers, in the sense of (2) any computing running the server  
part of a client‐server system. I see that Wikipedia conflates server (1)  
with server (2), that is it: they discuss “servers” as if (1) and (2) was  
the same thing.


Servers (1) are not very different from other desktop or laptop computers.  
There are some features sometimes found in “servers” that are not found  
in desktop and laptop computers, for example: ECC memory, support for more  
than 1 CPU, hardware RAID controller in motherboard or as a expansion card,  
rack mountable or blade form factor, support for SAS disks.


Almost any computer can be a server (2), you do not need a server (1). Unless  
you require a feature only found in servers (1), just ask your friends to  
give you any computer they are going to discard. This is good because it  
reuses what would otherwise be wasted, it means less money to  
megacorporations, less environmental contamination, and may monetarily cost  
you from nothing to less than purchasing a second hard server (1) from an  
stranger.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Cheap servers to buy?

[marioxcc . MT]

I can't comment on the idea that old hardware is more likely to work with  
free system than old hardware. In any case, I recommend you to do your best  
to determine whether a computer will work well in a fully free system before  
purchasing it; I recently wrote a short message about that (the whole thread  
is about hardware support of free software).


Bear in mind that the latest gNewSense release is very old. gNewSense 3  
(released in 2011) is based on Debian 6 Squeeze (released in 2011). If it  
doesn't work with some hardware, maybe a newer release or more recent fully  
free distribution will work.

Re: [Trisquel-users] getting an ubuntu notebook and installing debian 8?

[marioxcc . MT]

When buying any computing hardware, you must research whether it works with  
free software. You can start with h-node.org. The ideal procedure is (1) to  
build a list of all relevant components (usually the main IC manufacturer  
names and models), then (2) investigate whether each of them works with free  
software. Start by searching manufacturer name and model concatenated with  
“linux”, “drivers”, “firmware”, etcetera. Also look in the  
manufacturer web site and the kernel, X11 and related software documentation.  
It is unlikely that you will be able to verify that every component works  
with free software, because manufacturers don't often provide that  
information and it's not readily available elsewhere so you will have to run  
some risk that you will not be able to use the full functionality. The most  
problematic hardware is wireless NICs and graphics controller.


Search about “Intel Active Management Technology” and why it should be  
avoided (suggestion: start searching this forum).


Consider buying a computer certified to work with free software, like the  
Libreboot X200, which is probably the best option regarding free software.  
You will be supporting the development of free software and the reverse  
engineering effort (See the work done to disable AMT and ME in the X200).

Re: [Trisquel-users] How inconvenient freedom can be?

[marioxcc . MT]

I can't comment on user friendliness compared to Windows or OS X because I  
don't use them. I can comment, however, that Trisquel is derived from Ubuntu  
which has the reputation of being “user-friendly”.


I do not like the term “user-friendly”, but I do not oppose it on ethical  
reasons. It is usually associated with an attitude of designing computing  
systems so that they demand the least from the user (interest, knowledge and  
effort), at the expense of flexibility, capability and control. It is not  
clear that this approach ought to be called “friendliness”.


As an illustration: Trisquel has both a graphical installer which is  
“user-friendly” and a text based installer that gives the user more  
control, though it requires some technical knowledge about GNU/Linux (the  
user must know how to make a sane partition layout, for instance). Package  
management (installing, updating and uninstalling software part of the  
distribution) can be done through a graphical interface which doesn't  
requires any special knowledge, but there is also the text based “apt”  
and ”aptitude”, and you can edit directly the configuration files with  
any text editor and gives access to “advanced” features like version  
pinning.


Most modern GNU/Linux distributions work “out of the box”, without any  
further configuration needed to have a working environment ready for web  
browsing, text editing, etcetera.


There are plenty of free as in freedom games, check Libregamewiki. Some  
examples of well developed games are The Battle for Wesnoth and Warzone 2100.

Re: [Trisquel-users] PCB designing using only free software (?)

[marioxcc . MT]

There is also the gEDA project.

Re: [Trisquel-users] my files' permissions changed after a backup and new install

[marioxcc . MT]

“*” is substituted with the name of all files (including directories and  
special files) not beginning with “.” by default. All directories contain  
“.” and “..” which are pointers to the same, and parent directory,  
respectively (except for “/”, where both point to the current directory,  
since “/” has no parent directory). Other files beginning with “.”  
are by convention, called “hidden files”. At the filesystem level, there  
is nothing that makes them hidden. Programs usually don't display them. To  
list all files in a directory, use “ls -la”; to list all except “.”  
and “..”, use “ls -lA”. “..” is used in relative paths, for  
example, when changing directory through the command line, a common command  
is “cd ..”. For recursive use of “chown” using “.” (the current  
directory). If you want to change permissions of a directory and all of its  
content, then use “chown -R [...] .” where “[...]” represents other  
flags. Unlike “chown -R [...] *”, the above command will apply to the  
current directory and hidden files.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Can someone create a vagrant box or a docker base image with trisquel ?

[marioxcc . MT]

This is a very board request. You can find tutorials on almost any software  
package with a search engine, and you can and should consult the software  
documentation. Don't ask other people to do all the work for you. It's fine  
to ask for help with specific problems that you weren't able to solve after a  
serious effort.


You can install Trisquel and KVM in a virtual machine like you would install  
them directly. Make sure to take snapshots (with the virtual machine shut  
down) just after installation, and after configuring remote access through  
SSH, so that you can easily revert to the clean installation if necessary,  
much faster than reinstalling the system. With QEMU (the hypervisor for KVM),  
you can use the qcow2 format to be able to take snapshots, or put the virtual  
machine store in a LVM logical volume (in the host system, of course) and use  
LVM to handle snapshots. For more details, use a search engine and the  
documentation.

Re: [Trisquel-users] If I install CentOS 6......

[marioxcc . MT]

Economical activities ought to be a means to advance society, profit should  
only be an effect of providing a service to society; companies or individuals  
who seek otherwise do a harm to society (almost all of them). Proprietary  
software may be more profitable because it generates artificial scarcity so  
that the developer then can economically exploit it, not because it provides  
an higher benefit to society. Proprietary software is like selling rotten  
food to people so that they will first pay you for the food, then again for  
the medicines.


Here are some examples in the economic sector of informatics: Thinkpenguin,  
and Gluglug are committed to provide a real service to society. Facebook,  
Google, Microsoft and Apple are only interested in serving themselves,  
sometimes they serve society, and very often they harm it.


I interpret your question “why would they?” as “what motivation do they  
have?”: the answer is that they should avoid proprietary software because  
it gives an unfair power to their developers over their users.


They do not “have to appease to enterprise clients who want more support  
and perks than CentOS”, they chose to do so, and therefore it is not a  
justification for ignoring ethics. See also the essay “Have To” Is a  
Relative Phrase.

Re: [Trisquel-users] I noticed that Trisquel doesn't automatically check for updates, so I made yawn...

[marioxcc . MT]

I advice against recommending and using http://choosealicense.com/. It uses  
the open source viewpoint, promotes the attitude of “make the least effort  
possible” when licensing, and contains outright falsehoods.


Specifically, it invites to the bad practice of simply placing a license file  
in the program repository (see the link for an explanation). While it  
mentions the FSF and Apache Foundation recommendation of clearly licensing  
each file, it doesn't endorses it or mentions why it is important. The site  
fails miserably to address other points of licensing, like including  
Copyright notices for each Copyright holder: it doesn't even tries. Following  
their recommendation of just placing the license itself leaves the program  
without a Copyright notice.


The site contains factual errors: it asserts than “no license” allows  
commercial and private use. The GNU project has a better explanation of the  
effects of not including a license. See also Wikipedia and Commons  
explanations.


In the age where short web pages are around 30 KB of HTML plus images and  
reusable CSS, there is no reason to reject the GNU GPL on size. Also, if size  
is a problem, the Copyright holder can waive the requirement to include a  
copy of the GNU GPL. Copyleft is more than legal protection from  
proprietarization, it is also a political statement, and therefore it is a  
good idea to use it even for small scripts.


We have a serious source of information on licensing from the GNU Project  
which is much more comprehensive and has links to essays on free software as  
well (so it promotes the free software philosophy). I recommend, and advice  
to recommend this resource instead.

Re: [Trisquel-users] I noticed that Trisquel doesn't automatically check for updates, so I made yawn...

[marioxcc . MT]

¡Thanks for sharing the script!. Even if it duplicates existing  
functionality, the intention is good and so is the attitude of working in the  
problems you face and sharing the solution.


I recommend licensing under the GNU GPL 3 or any later version and to follow  
the GNU project licensing recommendations. There is a guide to the GNU GPL in  
http://copyleft.org/, alternative link http://gpl.guide/.


There are software hosting providers more compatible with the free software  
philosophy than Github, consider using them instead. There is GNU Savannah  
and several others. See threads in this forum 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or use this web  
site search engine on “gitorious”, which will give several threads about  
alternatives to it, including the ones I listed.

Re: [Trisquel-users] Looking for a hosting provider

[marioxcc . MT]

In 2014 I was searching for a VPS provider committed with the free software  
philosophy: one that doesn't advertises, sells, or provides specific support  
for proprietary software, calls the OS by the name GNU/Linux, has a policy of  
avoiding proprietary software other than proprietary JS, BIOS and firmware,  
and states it supports for free software in its web site. I evaluated at  
least 64 VPS providers (I know this lower bound because I built an incomplete  
list), my search lasted more than 2 weeks and I asked several free software  
supporters, in the FSFLA general mailing list and in this forum. I found only  
2 of them that meet my criterion: GNUtransfer and Corehost. A free software  
supporter kindly offered hosting the project in his VPS so I didn't hire a  
VPS in the end, but the project failed.


Ideally, we would only give our money to ethical business which also abide by  
the same rule (note the recursion, and that it requires that there is a set  
of business and people which only do business among themselves and all of  
them are ethical), but that is incompatible with living in society. This  
criterion is much, much stronger than the “committed with the free software  
philosophy” mentioned above and is not attainable in practice. I'm  
mentioning this only for comparison.


Some other free software friendly VPS providers: Linode (among others)  
sponsors, the software freedom day. Bytemark develops free software and it  
seems to have a mild interest in the free software philosophy. Positive  
Internet supports open source and according to what they told me: their  
policy is “always to prefer Free Software and hardware where practical.”,  
they encourage clients to use free software, sponsor (among others) the  
Debian long term support, and the founder apparently gives talks about free  
software.


There are practical considerations too. If you have never used a VPS, and you  
do not have experience setting up a mail server, I recommend practicing in a  
virtual machine. Configure the virtual machine as you would configure the  
VPS; this means using only SSH and not the graphical display. You should also  
set up attack protections and simulate DoS attacks and spam.


Jason Self may provide more information on hosting your own e‐mail server  
because that is what he does, but he uses a home computer.


Regards.

Re: [Trisquel-users] How do I access my computer from anywhere in the world from another computer?

[marioxcc . MT]

What do you mean by “access it”?. That is not a definite inquiry, so I  
can only guess what you intended to ask.


If you want to execute command line programs remotely, then look up  
“SSH”. If you want to see a desktop and execute graphical programs you  
can try to use VNC but for typical Internet connections it is going to be  
extremely slow and unresponsive, to the point of being unusable. Even  
high‐bandwidth Internet connections will not bring a good VNC experience  
when using them with computer near the other side of the world, the latency  
is too high. Only command line programs are usable (through SSH or similar)  
at distances in the order of magnitude of 10 000 km and it is still  
uncomfortable because of the high latency (what makes it more tolerable is  
that the way command line programs interact with the user typically is less  
affected by the delay).


Note that using SSH and VNC requires the computer to be running, so you'd  
need to leave it on while you are away (I don't recommend this, it is risky  
and wasteful of energy), somebody to power it on, or use  
“wake‐on‐LAN”.


Don't forget to use web search engines. Most of the questions you may have,  
have been answered thousands of times already.

Re: [Trisquel-users] How do I access my computer from anywhere in the world from another computer?

[marioxcc . MT]

Yes, I meant Jodiendo.