Minty Review: Linux Mint 16 (cinnamon flavor)

After being on the top of the chart for more than a couple of years, I finally decided to give Linux Mint a try, after all why are people using it so much? I must say I was biased previously because I though Mint looked a little too boring for me and aside from being an easy to use sort of distro, I didn't see the appeal. To be perfectly honest, I never thought Ubuntu was hard to use so even that appeal I don't quite understand.

Anyway, now that I've played with Mint for about a week, I feel like I can form a more relevant opinion, and to be honest I was not impressed. First of all, as I feared the OS to me looks very vanilla, and offered as far as I saw, nothing dramatically interesting. As I mentioned, often mint is labeled as a great distro to start with, and while it is easy to use, I had two crashes in my first day of use and one of them was while watching a regular video. I feel that a distrubution that is known for media compatibility out of the box should be able to play simple videos without a hiccup.Ubuntu 13.04 VM or my Xubuntu 12.04 VM. I had a lot of issues getting a few pieces of software, including my email client to work smoothly and that didn't help me have a good opinion of it.

I do need to disclose that I was running it as a virtual machine, so perhaps my experience would have been better on a hard install, but these are issues I didn't seem to have with my

Perhaps I am being unfair by reviewing Mint as a VM, but I've done that with other distros before and considering Mint's reputation, I don't feel that it requires special treatment on my review.

Overall, I feel that Mint, much like Ubuntu, has really helped bring Linux to a lot of new users, and I applaud them for that. I think that if there is anything that can be done to make Linux more popular, it should be done. With all the discourse regarding online privacy, the NSA and hackers, a shift to Linux is a great first step into trying to protect yourself. The Internet is my favorite invention of the 20th century and I truly believe that popularizing Linux is just another step into giving people online freedom, and ensuring that we stay in control of our own private habits. So Mint gets points for doing that, however as a distrubution for someone like me, I wasn't impressed. In my opinion Ubuntu is just as easy to use to a user with some computer knowledge and it offers a much more inovative experience. I have to admit I am an Unity fan boy, even though it is bulky. If I want a less meaty distro, my current pick is Xubuntu, I have yet to see another really lightweight distro that looks so good and functions so well.

You are a pirate

Recently it dawned on me that my needs for pirating have changed greatly since I started doing it, back in the Napster years. Pirating was something that began as a bit of a desire to have digital content such as music, videos, games and general software. As a teenager and eventually a university student, I just wouldn't be able to afford all these things. Once I got a job, and began my career I started to be able to afford things and I also started to feel the need to support things I cared about. I had heard the opinions of some many publishers and musicians that despite losing money from this practice, still supported it.

The first one I can remember, actually came from Fred Durst who always supported music sharing because it is how a lot of his music and the music of his peers even began to gain popularity. At the time I was a musician myself, and I voluntarily placed my music on Napster and similar services, in the hopes that if my music was linked to other popular artists I would be able to get it out. Obviously that didn't work for me in the end. The industry's attitude towards piracy has always been negative, of course because they make less money, however this is clearly an attitude of self interest, and of capitalist greed rather than a true desire to expand the reaches of the art. Also, what's even the point of trying to fight a war that has already been lost. All this pointless effort does is cost millions of dollars, affects greatly the few that actually get sued by these companies and in the end gets them nowhere.

Another great example from the industry for me was Notch, the Swedish game developer responsible for Minecraft. He basically said that he doesn't mind pirating. He made this game that eventually became very successful and the main reason for his success was efficient sharing of his content. Notch said that he prefers that people play an enjoy his game even if it is pirated. Obviously he prefers if people pay for it, but in the end, he would prefer someone playing the game for free than not playing it at all. It obviously gives him great personal satisfaction. Now, to be completely honest, when I first heard of Minecraft I thought "I don't get why this game is good". I was still intriged by it's sudden popularity during the beta days. So I downloaded it in torrent form. I played it for a week or so and decided it was good, so I purchased a license of the beta game. That wasn't the last time I did that either.



In the end, fighting against piracy is futile. Instead intelligent folks like Gaben and the guys behind Netflix decided to use the change in the industry to make money. They have been extremely successful and I gladly pay for their services. I have no problem paying money to support services trying to improve customer experience during a time where so many others are losing money.

Another big change in my downloading practices is that I started to pay money to pirate things. I dislike the idea of anti piracy efforts so much, and the anti privacy policies involved so much, that I rather pay for a third party to provide me with annonymity, than to pay for the media I'm wanting to use, just not enough to pay for it. This has an upside and a downside. On the downside, these anti piracy moves threaten the very essence of the internet. It threatens the greatest advancement in humanity of the last century, which is now the core that moves information, disseminating it over our ever shrinking world. Which means we have to continue to fight to maintain our cybernetic freedom. On the upside, I think this fear produced causes people to be more careful and make them attempt to protect themselves as well as educated themselves. Me, I learned all about networks like Usenet, which is a history lesson as well. I learned about VPNs, and how to hide behind proxies. All very useful information in this age where we are quickly becoming more vulnerable.

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Anyone, just to wrap this post up here is a relevant video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEBbu-wkKrs

First Assange, then Pirate Bay

Just saw a story about a co-founder of Pirate Bay getting arrested in Cambodia to be brought back to Sweden.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2012/09/03/tech-ap-pirate-bay-arrest.html

 I'm not sure how to interpret this, especially since he's only being charge for 1 year in prison in Sweden. That does seem like a relatively light sentence, but seeing this after what they did to Assange does seem to suggest Sweden is no longer as independent from North American influence. That's a bit sad, as Sweden has always been such a progressive nation when I comes to the distribution of information online.

Settled on Astrill as my VPN service

For a while I have been looking into different ways to gain a bit more privacy while online. I love the internet, and I do think it is the greatest invention of the 20th century, however, political parties and their archaic outlook on new technologies, slows down the natural progress of it. One of the main problems with the internet is privacy. Laws have not been evolving as quickly as the community, so a lot of them are outdated and infringe on basic freedoms already achieved in the real world. For that reason, I have decided that investing a little bit on a VPN service would be worthwhile.

I did a fair bit of research, and ended up settling on Astrill. I looked at a lot of different services, and as a package I think Astrill's service really suited my needs. One of the other contenders was "Hide my ass", which seems to be one of the most popular services out there. Indeed it was one of the ones I was most interested in. However, HMA made big news at one point when the folks from lulzSec got caught. Apparently HMA did provide authorities with logs that gave away a lot of vital information about its members. So entirely due to principles, in this case being that it makes no sense to pay a fee for privacy, if privacy is not really garanteed. It's not like LulzSec killed anyone.

The other big contender was Strong VPN, which I almost signed up with before I had done more reading. Their prices seem fair, and they do have a lot of options in terms of where their servers are, however, I really was looking for a service that included servers in different countries, freedom to switch servers frequently, the ability to connect via PPTP or OpenVPN. At Strong VPN, the ability to have all those things would cost me quite a lot, so I decided to go with Astrill. They offered pretty much all I wanted for a decent price if you do at least a 3 month contract.

The installation in Ubuntu as well as Windows 7 was easy. On Ubuntu you may need to download OpneVPN through apt-get, but after that you just click to download a small client. Windows just requires the client. I'll use it during the next few months, and I'll post if I encounter any problems.

PPTP, OpenVPN, IPSec and L2TP - What's the difference?

I have recently started to look into VPN services to enhance my privacy while using the interwebs. One thing that started to confuse me pretty quickly was the variety of different servers available, and honestly it took me a while to start to understand what the differences are. Well to make this process simpler for other people, here is a nice short summary from zzing123, which was posed at "perfect-privacy.com forum.

On a general level, PPTP was invented by Microsoft as a VPN that could be used with dialup, and is far older than OpenVPN, and as such is practically available from any device that supports a VPN of some description. That and the fact it's easy to use are really the only reasons it's used. In terms of security it's basically crap: at best it uses 128 bit encryption with an RC4 handshake (Handshake is the authentication/login process for setting up the VPN). At worst, 64 bit encryption and a plain-text handshake (so it wouldn't even take 2 weeks: just read the packet!). Naturally, PP uses the better sort.

OpenVPN is - in this league - very new technology. It's basically the amalgamation of several technologies, like SSH, Stunnel, OpenSSL's encryption libraries all of which provide unix with best of breed power and together form OVPN, a best of breed VPN. OVPN allows you to choose the method and algorithm for handshaking as well as for data encryption, plus uses SSL certificates, PSK's or User/Pass (or a combination of) to authenticate clients on top of that. With hardware acceleration, OVPN is easily faster than PPTP. Without acceleration, it's entirely dependent on the algorithms chosen - Blowfish is designed to be the fastest software-only algorithm, so OVPN would be a lot faster than PPTP. Encumbered with a software AES-256 implementation, and PPTP's 128 bit encryption is faster. This ultimate configurability is also OVPN's downfall: it's pretty complicated to set up.

With PP's OVPN service, ideally they should provide a client.crt and client.key unique to every customer, instead of using the auth-user-pass directive for ultimate security, but management of these keys becomes a nightmare. That said PP uses RSA 4096-bit encryption for the handshake and AES-256 for data, which are probably the two most secure algorithms you can use currently in OVPN.

There is also a third technology: L2TP / IPSec. L2TP provides the layer 2 tunnel, and IPSec the encryption, and was invented by Cisco to bridge 2 networks together. IPSec uses either RSA or a Pre-Shared Key (PSK) for the handshake, which uses Diffie-Hellman hashing over and above that. For data, it can use 3DES, DES, Blowfish, AES and CAST-128. IPSec does have pretty good support in clients and is widely regarded as being PPTP sorted out. Because Cisco developed it to sell more routers, a lot of expensive network gear has IPSec support built in, meaning that if you have very expensive network kit using IPSec, your VPN's will be so fast there's practically no latency overhead. Software implementations are as fast as PPTP.

So in summary:
- Choose PPTP: If you want an albeit crusty VPN technology available everywhere
- Choose OVPN: If you want the most powerful, secure and modern VPN
- Choose IPSec/L2TP: If you want high performance between two sites

Firefox slowness on Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10

I've been experiencing a very annoying slow browsing experience on my Firefox but I've found a fix for it. Type about:config in the address bar and hit enter.

from there you should see a list of configuration lines. Look for the following:

- network.dns.disableIPV6 

- network.http.pipelining

- network.http.proxy.pipelining

on all of these click with the right button and toggle them from false to true. Lastly look for

-network.http.proxy.pipelining.maxrequests

change this one from whatever is there (2 in my case) to 8

I hope this helps.

KompoZer, free HTML editor for Linux.

I've been using Dreamweaver as my HTML editor for as long as I can remember. I am pretty sure that before that I used notepad, but that was easily over 13 years ago. Well today I decided to look for a new editor that doesn't crash on me as much and that works on my Ubuntu distro. After doing some reading I decided to go with KompoZer, which is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) type editor, which to me just saves me a ton of time; and it seems quite popular in the community.

To get this beast you can either go the synaptic route or the console route, which will require you to type:

$ sudo apt-get install kompozer

I'll update this post once I have used the program a few times to let you guys know how I like it.

Canadians for net neutrality

Here is a message from a group fighting for something I feel quite strongly about, Net Neutrality. If you are not sure what net neutrality is, here is a definition:

"Network neutrality is a principle that advocates no restrictions by Internet service providers or governments on consumers' access to networks that participate in the internet. Specifically, network neutrality would prevent restrictions on content, sites, platforms, types of equipment that may be attached, and modes of communication."

They have a facebook group as well where you can get more information, but here is a message from the OpenMedia.ca team:

Big Telecom has decided to fight their customers instead of working to make the Internet more open and affordable, but together we can turn Canada from a digital laggard to a leader in connectivity and innovation.


Big phone and cable companies are losing control but they are not giving up without a fight—in fact they’re doubling down on greed. These companies are raising prices across the board while they still can, and trying to cozy up to policymakers: Bell has just appointed former Industry Minister Jim Prentice as a board member, and Telus has done the same with former Conservative MP Stockwell Day.


The Internet impacts every aspect of our lives, and we all deserve a say in its future. Take a moment to provide OpenMedia.ca with key input here: http://openmedia.ca/engage


Thanks to you, our petitions saw viral growth this year, and we gained national media coverage and caught the the attention of the Prime Minister’s office. You forced a CRTC review on Internet metering, and OpenMedia.ca testified at the subsequent public hearing this summer. The stakes were high and the pressure was on at the CRTC’s landmark hearing, but we held our own against the Big Telecom lobby. By the end of the two-week proceeding, nearly everyone was shunning usage-based pricing schemes, but we’re not done yet. Now, more than ever, we have to keep up the pressure so that the decision makers know Canadians want an open, affordable Internet.


We’ve gained momentum and Ottawa is starting to listen. Let’s keep up the charge.


Here are a few easy ways you can help right now:


1. If you haven’t already, fill out our pro-Internet survey: http://openmedia.ca/engage


2. Make a donation (http://openmedia.ca/donate, or help us continue to bring your voice to Ottawa by becoming a monthly donor (http://openmedia.ca/sustainer).


Your support has allowed us to get this far. Thank you so much for your ongoing efforts to champion the open and affordable Internet.


Onward,


Lindsey, Steve, Reilly, and the OpenMedia.ca Team

Tor project - protecting privacy while browsing

I just discovered a nice little tool to help protect me from the dangers of browsing. This tool is called Tor. This is a free software that helps you protect yourself from network surveillance and traffic analysis. If you care about anonymity online, this may be a good option. In order to get it running you can do some reading and get the app here:

Ubuntu instructions
Ubuntu installation
More Ubuntu network privacy info
Windows instructions

Tor also has a plugin for Firefox, and since I'm a Firefox user I will also need Torbutton

Just a note, Tor will help you with anonymity, but in no way it is perfect, there are still risks. Not only that but be aware that using Tor will probably slow down your internet, so use it as you see needed. If you have the firefox plugin you can enable and disable it whenever you want, which adds a bit of flexibility depending on your needs.

Hackers R Us

There have been a lot of hacker attacks in the news lately, it seems like it's happening more and more frequently now due to an increase in the number of hackers and interest in these services from advertiser and marketing people around the world. We do after all live in the age of information and information is money. Sony was one of the bigger attacks recently, causing PSN to shut down for a while and costing the company a huge stain in their image as well as millions in law suits. Now I hear Honda Canada has just been attacked as well, and I'm not even mentioning Air Miles and all the other North American databases that have had their networks breached for customer data. So what can companies and customers do to prevent being victims of these crimes?

I have been hearing about the end of human biological evolution for a while now. It is believed that biological evolution is too slow to compete with the technological evolution that humans have been experiencing for the past centuries. The mechanics of this evolution in this age of information is way too complex and fast for nations to overlook and control. Networks are faster and more integrated then ever and the trend is not changing anytime soon, and just like copyright issues we've been seeing for a while, privacy is going to continue to be a major area of discussion in the future years. These are issues that will not be countered by governments fast enough and the ignorance of people in these matters will eventually cause one of two things. Governments will enforce much more regulation on networks then necessary just to prevent issues such as these to propagate, or they will attempt to educate people more about vulnerabilities and corporations will eventually see that more attention needs to be paid to hacking and data theft.

I'm not a hacker, but I do find a lot of what hackers do fascinating. For years I've been learning just how vulnerable we really are to people that want to people with knowledge of networks and computers. The best thing to do at this point is to play safe, corporations should not be storing unneeded information and they should invest more in network security. In the end the consumers pay part of the price and companies are damaged as well. More and more technologies like this will be areas heavily explored for crimes and I am still waiting to see a digital act of terrorism. Unfortunately, much like flying nowadays, the Internet may very well be changed for the worst with cyber terrorism, this may be inevitable however.