Looking at the changes IPv6 brings it seems that people will be discouraged from using firewall appliances to protect their home networks. With IPv6 every system in your home will be vulnerable to direct attack from hostiles on the Internet. As many of us know the M$ operating systems have no real protection from direct exploits that bypass their internal local firewall (what a joke) because these exploits attack the OS as a lower level and the only thing protecting most home users has been the firewall they get when they use a home router. The internal Windows security has never been affective at stopping the endless onslaught of crafted packet attacks that bypass these weak security systems. All of this because the number of available IP addresses is dwindling down to nothing. You may ask why this is happening. It is happening because in no small part cell phone service providers did not want to put there cell phones on a subnet like they logically should, they want ever small device to have an unprotected direct link to the Internet. This will allow the service provider to remotely modify your cell phone, turn off features or even monitor your activity and location. It is not just cell phones and Windows but Linux systems as well that will find themselves under attack. Almost all Linux systems today come bundled with all sorts of features that we rely on for our daily computing. Install any desktop Linux system and run netstat  -nap to see an endless list of vulnerable sockets ready to accept any morsel of data that is sent to them. Most desktop install of Linux come with local MTA (Mail Transport Agents) to deal with local email from programs on the system, one small mis-configuration and your trusty Linux system will become a SPAM zombie. There are dozens of ways that we know external ports can be comprised like CUPS, FTP, and Samba to name a few, but there have been prof-of-concept remote exploits for services that should only accept connections from local sockets, like the X sockets that your graphical desktop uses. For decades we have been protected by firewall boxes that keep all our devices safe. Well that safety is about to be taken away from us and all your dirty little secrets are going to be available to any black hat 1337'er out there. I personally will keep my home on IPv4 behind an IPv6-to-IPv4 router, with a firewall and IPv6 will be removed from all my devices. My cellphone does not have IPv6 and when it dies and I can no longer get a phone without IPv6 well maybe I just don't need a phone that badly, or maybe I will get a phone that I can hack to make the IP constantly changing to hide my location from the evil overlords. And as for Windows systems, well if you run Windows then you have become accustomed to this sort of abuse so you can still take comfort in that you do not suffer alone.

I have never been passionate about the new toys that come with the latest distro of Linux. I am more of a person that is passionate about something new I can learn. At last count I could program in 20 different languages on six different operating systems (counting all versions of Linux as just one). I write code, I design circuit boards, I develop embedded systems, I build telephone servers, web servers and databases. All of these things I do because Linux distro's give me the tools and encourage me to use them. Some things I never do, I never ever clean viruses out of computers, tell people to reboot Windows or spend sleepless nights awake and panicking because the Microsoft servers are going to die any day now and there is nothing I can do about it. That is the sate I was in back in 1998, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I had panic attacks that caused my whole body to shake violently, so bad that I had to go to the hospital emergency room. In a Microsoft world I was a worthless consumer who's only purpose for existence was to continue to pay for all eternity for broken promises. I was so powerless in a Microsoft world that I considered getting out of the computer business, maybe I would have gone to work in construction, anyplace that did not have something to do with computers. I could just be one of the other mindless zombies that when Windows crashes I take a coffee break and wait for the stressed out computer repair guy to fix it. Feckless and ignorant to the decay of a failed society where stupidity is the most valued asset of your customers.When I think about it I can truly say that Linux saved my life. With Linux I know that nothing is beyond my abilities, everything has a solution and the system is designed to help me find it. What am I passionate about? The freedom, freedom to live, freedom to learn and the freedom to make my own choices as to what is best for me.

Cygwin is blurring the line between Linux OS and Useless OS! I was talking to a member at the LLUG meeting last night about how you can run a Linux desktop on your Windows OS. I did this for a joke but some people may need to do this. Let's just say you hate the annoying and useless UI of the Windows desktop and you would like a power desktop like in Linux but for some reason you cannot use Linux as your main OS and VMplayer just is not doing it for you. Solution, cygwin. Cygwin is to Windows what WINE is to Linux. It provides a very powerful GNU environment to Windows. You can run bash as your shell, you can compile and run open source programs that are designed for *NIX systems you can even replace the Windows desktop manager with a Linux like desktop manager. I have been successful at replacing the explorer desktop with XFCE. And it works well. You can even enable X11 sockets for Windows so that you can open SSH tunnels and run Linux GUI programs on your Windows desktop. Here are some helpful links. Get cygwin here http://cygwin.com/ Some help setting it up http://www.compuspec.net/reference/os/cygwin/installation.shtml X11 for Windows via cygwin http://x.cygwin.com/ Gnome on cygwin http://cygnome.sourceforge.net/ KDE on cygwin http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/ XFCE on cygwin http://clde.sourceforge.net/xfce4-cygwin/index.html X11 sockets for Windows http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/ SSH for Windows http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ SCP for Windows http://winscp.net/eng/index.php There is a commercial product to provide SSHd for Windows but I have not tried it. http://winscp.net/eng/index.php Cygwin also has an SSHd but I think it maybe a little harder to setup, I have never tried it.

For about two years now I have been running Ubuntu. Not because I like it, I don't, I am just too lazy to install anything better. Ubuntu is like day old bread to me, it starts off not as good as you would like and it just goes down hill from there. It seems the update manager has a few dozen new fixes for me every day but it never fixes the bugs that annoy me and have been there from day one.  So I am trying a few other Linux distros that I have not tried in a very long time. Looking at Fedora, Gentoo and openSUSE vs. Ubuntu. Read more to find out what I think about these heavy weight players.

If you have a cell phone you will want to protect your self from scammers.My wife and I were out of town on the weekend and normally turn off our cell phones when we travel. When we got back all my wife's minutes on her Pay & Talk Telus phone were all used up. She does not use the phone much so I have it set to refill each month for $10 off my credit card. I know she did not use her phone that much so I went on the Telus web site to check the billing details. Her phone had been billed for 3 text messages at a cost of $2 each. Many LUG members have talked in the past about how the big cell phone companies in Canada had changed to billing customers for receiving text message but those fees where about $0.25 per message. It looks like the sender of these messages is able to collect the rest of the fee and they have a program that sends out these messages to cell phone users without their permission. This is a great scam, they could be stealing from millions of Canadian cell phone users. Most people I talk to about the text message billing on cell phones believe that the cell phone companies will not allow you to disable text messages but they do. I was on the phone for about an hour before I was able to get to a human working in technical support at Telus and he was able to turn off all text messaging for my wife's Pay & Talk phone. I tried with no success to get the money back but because this is a pay before you use service the money is gone. Telus does not keep details on text messages on Pay & Talk phones, or so I was told. My other phone is on a contract that I would be able to refuse payment on if scam happens to that number. If you don't use text messaging call your service provider and have it disabled. If you do then watch your bill closely, this criminal will strike again.

I was looking for a CLI (Command Line Interface) way to add of the space used on my hard drives and found this cool site. http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html with lots of fun commands to try on the CLI. The answer to what I was doing. The program df shows the size, used space and free space of your hard drives. The program bc is a CLI math program. The programs grep and gawk allow you to select only the parts you want to use. royce@Hydra[~] #/bin/df -h | head -n 1; /bin/df -h |grep hda Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda2 54G 43G 7.8G 85% / /dev/hda1 20G 2.2G 18G 12% /mnt/other royce@Hydra[~] #/bin/df | head -n 1; /bin/df |grep hda Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda2 55866816 44859624 8169312 85% / /dev/hda1 20482840 2298176 18184664 12% /mnt/other So to see the total size in Bytes /bin/df | grep hda |gawk '{print $2}' | (tr 'n' +; echo 0) | bc So to see the total size in Giga Bytes expr $(expr $(/bin/df | grep hda |gawk '{print $2}' | (tr 'n' +; echo 0) | bc) / 1024) / 1024 So to see the used space in Bytes /bin/df | grep hda |gawk '{print $3}' | (tr 'n' +; echo 0) | bc So to see the used space in Giga Bytes expr $(expr $(/bin/df | grep hda |gawk '{print $3}' | (tr 'n' +; echo 0) | bc) / 1024) / 1024 So to see the free space in Bytes /bin/df | grep hda |gawk '{print $4}' | (tr 'n' +; echo 0) | bc So to see the free space in Giga Bytes expr $(expr $(/bin/df | grep hda |gawk '{print $4}' | (tr 'n' +; echo 0) | bc) / 1024) / 1024 To format the output royce@Hydra[~] #echo $(expr $(expr $(/bin/df | grep hda |gawk '{print $4}' | (tr 'n'+; echo 0) | bc) / 1024) / 1024)GB free space 25GB free space royce@Hydra[~] # Happy hacking :)

There is now a Wiki to help you get started with programming in PerlQt.PerlQt Wiki

PerlQt is a very easy to use programming tool that is powerful enough for advanced developers and now it super easy for beginners as well. Radados developers have created a PerlQt project manager that makes it very easy to learn the starting steps of computer programming by reducing the complex steps of project creation to a few simple buttons. This tool does not teach anyone how to program in Perl or C++ with Qt but it does enable users to explore their possibilities with out feeling intimidated by the complexities that PerlQt is handling for them automatically in the background. Radados users can install it using synaptic search for the package name radados-perlqt. PerlQt can be made available for other Linux system and for Windows(cygwin) but the Radados install is the easiest way to get up and going in a mater of seconds. Radados users will have a new PerlQt icon on their ViceWM desktop or can start the project manager by running PerlQt.pl. More information here

Radados packages ported to Gutsy for fixing small issues with the command line and SMB clients are now available for Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10. Ubuntu Gutsy fixes (download here)

• Add vi syntax highlights
• Make use of ssh-agent
• Require PKI for SSH login
• Fix Zenity focus bug
• Set TTY getty's to readable font size
• Add much needed CLI aliases
• Set PS1 colors

Radados Samba Client (download here)

• Configure your Linux system to authenticate to a SMB domain controller.
• Added pam_mount.conf.xml changes needed for Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10

IPcop does not ship with RAID1 support. I like to use RAID1 for my firewalls because IPcop only needs about 5G to work and you cannot buy new hard drives that small.It is a waste to use a large hard drive when there are so many small older drives that would work just fine so if you use older drives RAID1 is a good idea.I used Radados linux for this but another live CD may work. The kernel must be recompiled and custom IPcop modules, like IP filters for h323 are missing because I tried many times to follow the IPcop directions to build the IPcop source files but it dies with errors every time.Steps1) Install two IDE hard drives as HDA and HDB to your new firewall2) Install IPcop 1.4.20 to the HDA (other versions of IPcop may need to adjust this script)3) Reboot with a live CD and run this scriptDownload here

The real heart of open source lies in its potential to be greater than the sum of its parts, the capacity to leverage the talent and abilities of an entire community of developers and users who are striving towards a common goal.

CNN reports that Microsoft may charge extra for security software. So first they edge their competition out of the browser market, then they tie IE into the OS so tightly that a crash in IE can crash the computer, and then they make IE so vulnerable that just using it is hazardous to the typical computer's health, and now they want to CHARGE users to fix it?

A public university with an enrollment of over 80,000 put the kibosh this week on Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and urged its students to switch to alternative browsers such as Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, or Safari.

SAN DIEGO, Dec. 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The U.S. browser usage share of Firefox, the upstart Mozilla-based browser that has become a champion of the open source movement, has grown by more than a third over the past month, according to the latest independent study from WebSideStory (Nasdaq: WSSI) (http://www.websidestory.com), a leading provider of on-demand Web analytics

COMMENTARY -- Within the technology industry, there are such fervent supporters on both sides of many polarizing issues that you'd think these issues are religious rather than technological. Linux vs. Windows, AMD vs. Intel, PC vs. the Mac, proprietary vs. open source are a few examples. But Microsoft's Service Pack 2 for Windows XP?! Why SP2 deserved every shred of the scrutiny

If you are using Windows XP and are thinking about applying the new XP patch, you really need to read this. You better grab a coffee, it is a long one. Here is the link WinXP SP2 = security placebo?

As the first serve rocketed across the net at this week's U.S. Open tennis tournament Monday, millions of Internet users tracked the scores as if they were seated courtside. The powerful eServer i5, IBM's next-generation iSeries server, is providing real-time technology updates to the U.S. Open Web page, allowing fans to keep track of every backhand returned.

There is a greater need to consider the social benefits of using free and open source software(FOSS) and not just the economic economic advantages, Alan Levine, CIO of Future Perfect told delegates at last week's Second Open Source Software Africa conference in Johannesburg. Levine said that the use of FOSS should not only be evaluated by project, business case or system. He said the traditional total-cost-of-ownership and return-on-investment models cannot take into account all the business implications of using FOSS.

A worm capable of using webcams to spy on users is circulating across the Net.

E-mail privacy suffered a serious setback on Tuesday when a court of appeals ruled that an e-mail provider did not break the law in reading his customers' communications without their consent. The First Court of Appeals in Massachusetts ruled that Bradford C. Councilman did not violate criminal wiretap laws when he surreptitiously copied and read the mail of his customers in order to monitor their transactions.