Huggers to head BBC technology

By Rob Minto

Published: July 19 2008 03:00

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

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Gnu.

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Hurd.

Does it really matter, as long as people use it?  People use Cars without understanding how an engine works, and without constantly referring to the efforts of their forefathers.  Let’s just get on with promotion of the product, rather than wrangling about a name

However, there’s an angle to his talk which isn’t covered in this short presentation; which I imagine is due to time constraints. That’s the opportunity for cross-discipline collaboration, and what that means for us.

One of the more interesting points made by Clay, is that he poses the current ‘$1 million question’ - Are Bloggers Journalists? - and then turns it on its head.

Journalists, and journalism came about to fulfil a societal need. How to communicate with the majority of the population. Gutenburgs’s printing press was a percursor to European journalism, and for the last 400 years or so, journalism has been an integral part of mass communication.

However, we now have a little something called the internet - which, as Gutenburg’s printing press did all those years ago, revolutionise access to information. The infrastructure required to become a ‘messenger to the people’ is in place for people to with it as they wish - create facebook pages, youtube videos, or wordpress blogs. Once the infrastructure becomes freely accessible, the applications of it become massively varied.

In Clay’s talk, he mentions a ratio. 80% of people do 20% of the work, and vice versa, using a lovely graph of the long tail:

An Example of the Long Tail Graph

Though a graph illustrating a different set of data, the concept can be re-applied to Open Source Project contribution. The Green area applies to the ‘core’ developers, who may even be employed by the project. The Orange applied to the people directly involved with the project, and perhaps some power users, and the Red section applied to everyone else.

The wonderful thing about the Red section, is that you get lots and lots of people contributing very little. However, it’s these people who can really add value to a project.  With so many projects now existing across different distributions, each system becomes pretty unique.  Where bugfixes and irrationailities can be spotted and reported on by end-users running their unique system - the value added is huge.

There’s also a question of expertise.  The guys in the Red Section are the programming experts, who are commiting code.  Those in the Orange Section are the users/implementers of the code - so will typically have a clear understanding of the direction of the project and the needs that the project needs to fulfil. Whereas in the Red Section are people who use the package, but often alongside other packages of greater interest/relevance to their line of work.  It’s this cross-discipline collaboration that is unprecedencted.

Getting average non-geeky end users to use Open Projects is a massive challenge, but one that is going to bring massive benefits to Open Source Software.  Some people talk of the digital tipping point from a technical standpoint - “Woo, when we get this critical mass we’ll overtake Microsoft within the next 5 years.”  To be honest that doesn’t bother me. Judge MS as you wish, but that’s not why I’m here.  I’m here because the potential contribution that end users can make to Global Knowledge, through Open Projects.

It’s going to be possible for a biological scientist and and engineer to be reviewing the same problem for different purposes.  It’s unlikely that these two disciplines would ever communicate were it not be for this open project, and it’s also possible that only with the combined knowledge and expertise of these two disciplines, the problem can be solved.

This is what excites me most about free software, and to think we’re only just at the beginning.

How easy would it be to create a new internet. Get back to 56K modems and telnetting between people to pass round information?  or would it simply be a massive ‘encrypted net’ - where legitimate and illegitimate activity get bundled together, hidden from prying eyes?

Edit - as grifferz pointed out.. this makes little sense; I’ll have to redress the issue in the future properly.

However, our quantitative lecturers disagreed.  They liked to analyse and draw lovely graphs showing difference behavioural patterns.  Attach electrodes to heads to monitor electrical pulses in the brain, and quantify social experiments using hard statistics and probability algorithms.

Well, they’re now approaching the end of their careers in this field, as Google and the ‘database generation’ take over.

There’s so much information on the internet now, that we don’t need to know whether someone is going to do something or not - we can actually see records of what they do.  Having the browsing habits of thousands, or millions of people is almost priceless data.  It’s the stuff that quantititative psychologists can only dream of.  Any psychologist will tell you how valuable that data is to them.

Well, today Alexander Hanff - fighting for our freedom - heads to the House of Lords in order to prevent Phorm from getting their hands on our data; and to question why BT haven’t yet been charged on any count for gross invasion of privacy in regards to their trials of the Phorm software last summer.

In order to understand what we’re dealing with, I offer the following analogy to those less technically minded.

The internet is an exchange of bags, each containing a little bit of information.  Let’s say you pass one bag a second from your machine across the internet to an ‘internet server.’  It’s very easy for someone to look into any of these bags - but mainly due to volume (but also due to simple logistics) people tend not to bother looking in your bags.  It’s not to say they can’t though.

Well, phorm contains software that looks through all your bags, and analyses them for ‘key-words’, from which they can then target adverts at you.  If you’re communicating with someone, why do you want them looking through your bags - you don’t!

When you deal with your bank, you’d put a padlock on the bags, that only they and you have the key to unlock.. so your online banking details are safe..r.  If you’d rather not have someone looking through all the information you exchange across the internet, charging you for the pleasure, and then holding more information on your browsing habits than you even do yourself.. say Yes to Phorm.  else do the sensible thing and “JUST SAY NO!”

It’s quite annoying when you receive SPAM from one of your own email addresses.  In my case, it was plum202@hotmail.com.

It’s an address I registered and used way-back-when - and hasn’t seen me using it for the last 5-6 years.

Anyhow, I logged onto it, and tried to close my account.  However, I could not do so as there was a ‘billing account linked to your Live ID.’  I was advised to goto https://billing.microsoft.com to resolve this issue.

However, on landing at https://billing.microsoft.com - I was greeted with a message to say “This Live ID does not have a billing relationship with Microsoft.  Please Click Here to join.

Silly Microsoft.

Anyhow, I phoned their customer support… three different numbers I was passed between til ending up with some Hotmail specific department.  I spent over an hour on the phone in total, and finally ended up with the support guy passing an email onto someone else to take a look.

The best thing about it - the guy set a gmail.com address as the reply-to: address.

I thought I’d ask him a few questions and get him to give me some advice on hotmail versus gmail.  He duly obliged, telling me to goto google.com and sign up there ‘or something like that.’

Yeah.. bear this in mind when you next choose a Webmail provider.

Instructions for CentOS 5 (with ip_vs loaded in kernel as module).

Load ip_vs module

modprove ip_vs

Install ipvsadm

yum install ipvsadm

Run the following commands on the commandline and test them by visiting the $(external_ip) address in your browser.

ipvsadm -A -t $(external_ip):$(port) -s rr -p $(timeout_in_seconds)
ipvsadm -a -t $(external_ip):$(port) -r $(nat_ip_real_server1):$(port)
-m -w $(weight) [ example = 1 ]
ipvsadm -a -t $(external_ip):$(port) -r $(nat_ip_real_server2):$(port)
-m -w $(weight) [ example = 1 ]

Once you’re confident they’re set right.  run:

ipvsadm –save

This will output the config file to the screen.  Copy that into /etc/sysconfig/ipvsadm.

nano /etc/sysconfig/ipvsadm

Restart ipvsadm

/etc/init.d/ipvsadm restart

Test the sites.

Make module & config persistent @ boot time:

echo modprobe ip_vs >> /etc/rc.modules
chmod +x /etc/rc.modules
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!! /etc/rc.modules is used instead !!
!! of rc.local as it loads earlier !!!!!!!!!
!! in the boot process.!!               !!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

chkconfig –add ipvsadm

Done

I like that.

There is a simple way to do this, pointed out to me by Gavin Henry of Suretec Systems on the OpenLDAP mailing lists:

“Every account that should be subject to password policy control should
have a pwdPolicySubentry attribute containing the DN of a valid
pwdPolicy entry, or they can simply use the configured default. In this
way different users may be managed according to different policies.”

Therefore, the way to do it is to copy your cn=default,ou=policies,dc=example,dc=com to a new dn, such as cn=admins,ou=policies,dc=example,dc=com.

Then in each of your system admins, add the

pwdPolicySubentry:  cn=admins,ou=policies,dc=example,dc=com

Simple really!

*I’m currently waiting to work out how to apply ppolicy by group, rather than having multiple ppolicies applied individually.

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