The Zero Room

I'm in shock. I've just heard from Slashdot that the LugRadio podcast is soon to be no more. I've been a sufferer of LugRadio Syndrome - inappropriate giggling fits in public places - since series one, and while I can't say I've ever aquired any useful technical information from the programme, it did once render me breathless and weeping with mirth while in a doctor's waiting room, which I think got me in to see the doctor sooner than I otherwise would have. I've also learned that the proper response to, for instance, Novell announcing an exciting new product is to exclaim "Beard!", or "My chin!", and that you shouldn't give the actor who plays Harold Bishop in Neighbours a hard time about his weight, because he (allegedly) has a blisteringly funny riposte.

I haven't enjoyed a podcast so much since the Slashdot guys did Geeks in Space (of course it wasn't called podcasting back then, and we had to listen to it by piping the output of NCSA Mosaic to an eight-track cassette recorder via a SCART connector). I'm not sure what I'm going to do without LugRadio. The Rissington Podcast is amusing and geeky, but the presenters are, it must be said, Mac users, so there's a bit of a cultural divide to get over. FLOSS Weekly has some great interviews from time to time, but there's even more of a culture problem there (American). Can anybody suggest some others?

Someone's done a really nice home usability test on Ubuntu 8.04, using his girlfriend as the experiment. Apart from the good old-fashioned flame-bait value of this, I'm finding usability studies increasingly fascinating. From my own experience, it's remarkably common to find features that seem an obvious good idea from one point of view can be intimidatingly bewildering from another (and often I'm the bewildered one).

For example, I have one website that allows anonymous users to post content, although for obvious reasons each post has to be approved by an administrator. When content is submitted, the user is redirected to the site's front page, and gets a message in a little box with a different background colour to the rest of the page, telling them that their post is awaiting approval. Clear enough, you may think. However I got some feedback today from a user saying that the site is broken, because every time they try to post anything, all they get is an error message. You might say that the user should at least stop to read the message, but on the other hand something is wrong from a usability point of view if a message telling the user that everything is working perfectly fine looks at first glance like an error message. Usability is hard.

Robin 'Roblimo" Miller has an interesting bit of flamebait over at Linux.com, talking about why it's so hard to switch operating systems or desktop environments withing the one operating system. His point seems to be that our deeply-held preferences are established by first impressions (or even chance), then entrenched by habit, no matter how vigorously we might argue that we have a rational basis for them.

I'm not sure I agree with him; GNOME is a better desktop environment than KDE; both are easier to use than the WIndows or Mac user interface; nano is a sensible choice for a programmer's text editor, because... ah... okay, maybe he's got me there. ^O ^X

"Four species of penguins that breed in Antartica are endangered by global warming," notes Richard Stallman. "Even I, the only man in the world who can get angry from looking at a picture of a penguin, find this bad news."

If it's any consolation, the gnu has apparently increased in number from 100,000 in 1950 to 1.5 million. According to Wikipedia, the collective noun for a herd of gnus is 'implausibility'. This means something; I'm sure of it.

Just a reminder: you can help the other implausible GNU (and indirectly, that blasted penguin), by joining the Free Software Foundation. I finally did so this year, and ever since I have experienced a tremendous sense of tranquility and well-being. I now radiate a dazzling aura of geeky freedom, every Windows computer I walk past BSODs (although that may just be coincidence), and choirs of free software angels herald my arrival wherever I go. It's really cool.

Image from Boy on a Stick and Slither copyright Stephen L. Cloud. Reproduced with permission.

In the first part of this Article, I talked about the technical reasons commonly given for deploying web content filtering software, or "censorware". If content filtering software worked as reliably as claimed, and if it were not easy to circumvent, these technical concerns may, if we are prepared to put moral concerns to one side, be considered justification for censorship. As I have already argued, the software is not reliable or unbreakable, and will never be so, because what is expected of it is technically impossible. As a purely academic exercise, therefore, let's take a look at some of the other problems censorware claims to address, and why it would be morally wrong to deploy censorware, even if the software posessed all the magical powers people expect of it.

We'll also take a look at just a couple of the countless ways to circumvent censorware.

As before, the opinions expressed in this post are my own, and do not reflect the opinions of any other member of the Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club, or the club as a whole.

Five minutes into the last computer club meeting, I was in the process of showing somebody a website distributing some software for running a library, and found myself instead showing them a web page telling us that we weren't permitted to access this site because it was in the blocked category of "freeware/software downloads".

Max said that he'd earlier had a similar problem while trying to show somebody an auction site. I tested this out and sure enough eBay, et. al. were similarly inaccesible because they fall in the blocked category of "auction sites".

The club has installed web content filtering "censorware" on the gateway between it's local network and the outside world. As a club member, I'm appalled by this for a number of reasons:

• censorware doesn't work to significantly reduce IT security risks
• censorware is an attack on freedom of thought and expression, and is morally wrong, regardless of how well it does or doesn't work

Of course this makes running a computer club from within the club's network practically impossible. Or rather it would if circumventing the censorware hadn't been ten minutes work.

In principle however, it is outrageous that an organisation with a commmunity service mission should opt to control the behaviour of it's members and staff using techniques favoured by brutal dictatorships.

In the first part of this article, which I stress reflects my own personal opinions and not those of the Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club as a whole, I will go into detail about how and why censorware doesn't work as a solution to percieved IT security problems that arise from unrestricted access to the Web.

In future posts, I shall examine the ineffectiveness of censorship as a solution to low employee productivity, why it shouldn't be used even if it was effective, and outline a few of the multitude of trivially easy censorware circumvention techniques.

I've been looking around the new features in Gutsy, and was interested in what's new with the "restricted drivers manager", the gadget that looks after any non-free software required to make unfriendly hardware work. Tried to launch it and was told:

Could these be the eight sweetest words in the English language?

Lugradio's Stuart Langridge (who must I'm afraid get used to the idea that he will probably never receive as much noteriety for anything else he does as long as he lives), after a laptop purchase which can fairly be described as a fiasco, asks the question "Which video card should I buy?" for his desktop PC.

Among the answers is a link to an awesomely useful page: http://free3d.org

The page uses the fairly rough and ready benchmark of the glxgears screensaver frame rate to rank different combinations of hardware and free software. I'm quite pleased with my 930 frames-per-second result (Intel Corporation 82G965 Integrated Graphics Controller, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4300 @ 1.80GHz), and my masculinity is not at all threatened by the >6000fps results at the top of the table. With figures like this, and two out of the three major 3D hardware manufacturers (AMD/ATI and Intel) actively providing free driver software (not to mention in one case complete hardware specsifications!), it's time to bury the myth that free software operating systems don't do good 3D.

This development makes me think of all those years reading HOWTOs and editing modelines and want to weep tears of joy: