Such journalistic stories are valuable and necessary, because much hush-hush information is overclassified, is kept under wraps only because it is embarrassing to the U.S. government, or is classified to keep the public in the dark about questionable government policies or actions. During the Cold War and continuing to this day, the American public is often the last to know information that is common knowledge among intelligence agencies of adversarial nations. Excessive government secrecy is a serious and underrated problem in a republic and has been exacerbated by the spike in clandestine government actions in the Bush-Obama war on terror.
If the government of a republic is going to keep secrets from its own people for their own good (faith is required here), they should keep the restricted information to the minimum. If the government drastically reduced its vast storehouse of secrets to what was truly needed to protect intelligence agents and troops in the field, whistleblowers such as Manning would have much less reason to leak and would likely have more respect for the necessity not to disclose the remaining vital information.
Most important, if a republican government cannot keep its secrets secret, it should not prosecute third-party, non-governmental recipients of the material, but should concentrate on plugging the leaks in its security system.
Source: http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2010/08/24/the-possible-prosecution-of-wikileaks/
OpenMediaVault is looking quite promising. Development is still underway, and author has provided no taste to his loyal fans. This is another project from the same developers that brought you FreeNAS, an OS designed to store all of your files safely and secure, and make them accessible via a wide array of different networking protocols. It was based on FreeBSD. However, OpenMediaVault will be based on Debian GNU/Linux.
Do you really dislike being forced to use Adobe Download Manager (DLM) just to download flash for your favourite browser? Look no more! Get Adobe Flash directly! If Adobe leaves you high ‘n’ dry and the link fails, try their Troubleshooting page.
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enSUSE was released on July 15th. I downloaded the 32-bit DVD today, because I wanted to try the new LXDE Desktop that is included with the disk (thanks to Andreas for making that effort!). It is currently being test driven on VirtualBox on openSUSE 11.2, and MAN is it ever FAST! It’s probably the 1.5GB RAM upgrade Read more…
Canada’s new Copyright Law!
Copyright-Act-C-32-English-Redline (PDF 460K)
I have always found GNU find to be a little bit tricky to use. It is indeed quite a powerful program. It allows you to search anywhere, for anything! With the output, you can use the -exec option to run a command on each and every file find finds.
Read more…
It’s week 8 now at Uni, out of 13 weeks in all. The pressure will come in around two weeks, I think. CCNA case study, CCNA practicals, Computer Forenics Project report (80% of my mark), 20% for Computer Forensic presentation, around 30-40% for surviving group attacks from Advanced Network Management (aka GNU Linux server management). All in all, a laid-back semester.
Heading out to Cairns on Saturday. Stoked! Going scuba diving.
I can feel Brizzy getting colder now, as April begins to close. May will be stressful, with assignments and group work. Overall, this semester has been among my easiest. Reminds me of my final year as undergrad in Canada. I took French, Spanish, and Philosophy – what a breeze! Cairns coming up. Promise I’ll post up underwater pics 
There is a great thread about endianess, Unicode, BOM (byte order marks), and other interesting topics.
Today, the jury in the District Court of Utah trial between SCO Group and Novell issued a verdict.
Novell is very pleased with the jury’s decision confirming Novell’s ownership of the Unix copyrights, which SCO had asserted to own in its attack on Linux. Novell remains committed to promoting Linux, including by defending Linux on the intellectual property front.
This decision is good news for Novell, for Linux, and for the open source community.