Interview by Jayson Rowe

I was interviewed recently by Jayson Rowe for his blog.

• http://jaysonrowe.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/interview-with-dustin-kirkland-ubuntu-server-developer/

Thanks, Jayson.

:-Dustin

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope Desktop Wallpaper

I was a little disappointed that Intrepid Ibex didn't get its own desktop wallpaper until really late in the development cycle (2008-09-26).

I run so many Hardy, Intrepid, and Jaunty virtual machines at a time, that the background is usually the easiest way to tell them apart.

So I decided to create my own Jaunty Jackalope background image for this development cycle.


I used a picture I had taken last spring, when a momma rabbit had 4 baby rabbits in our front yard. Using Gimp, I cropped it, tweaked it to a more "human" color scheme, and rendered some little jackalope button horns. The original looks like this:


As such, these 3 little Jackalopes are "under development", and nearly arranged in an Ubuntu "circle of friends" ;-)

Enjoy,
:-Dustin

Ubuntu Jaunty: updates-available and reboot-required now in /etc/motd!

Any brave souls out there running Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope yet?

No? Okay, okay, you're right... Perhaps it's a bit early for that. But what about in a virtual machine?

The Ubuntu Developer Summit isn't until December, but we're already busy working on Jaunty!

With some help from Michael Vogt, update-notifier is now able to publish information about available updates, and required system restarts. It uses update-motd to collect and publish a rich, dynamic Message-of-the-Day dialog.

This new functionality hopes to provide an equivalent to the Updates Available and Restart Required icons in the Ubuntu desktop system tray, for the Ubuntu server.

The result looks something like:

Linux dustin-desktop 2.6.27-7-generic #1 SMP Tue Nov 4 19:33:06 UTC 2008 x86_64

The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.

To access official Ubuntu documentation, please visit:
http://help.ubuntu.com/

79 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

kirkland@t61p:~$

And, when a reboot is required, like this:

Linux dustin-desktop 2.6.27-7-generic #1 SMP Tue Nov 4 19:33:06 UTC 2008 x86_64

The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.

To access official Ubuntu documentation, please visit:
http://help.ubuntu.com/

0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

**** System restart required ****

kirkland@t61p:~$ 

We still have a few kinks to work out, and a few optimizations coming, but all told, this is good stuff for the Ubuntu Server!

:-Dustin

Nearest Book (MeMe)

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Goverment - Saving Privacy in the Digital Age
by Steven Levy

Page 56, Sentence 5:

"The behavior of the S-boxes in the DES system involved complicated substitutions and permutations that put Rube Goldberg to shame."

Jono's instructions:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
  

VP-Elect Joe Biden is Responsible for Open Sourcing Email Encryption?

There are rumors that the Obama campaign used an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, though further analysis seems to indicate that these images were fakes. It would be great if someone from the Obama campaign would comment publicly and officially on this. I would love to think that there might be room for Ubuntu and Linux in the next administration, perhaps in the new CTO cabinet position. With Warren Buffet being suggested as a potential Treasury Secretary, I fear that his recently-retired friend Bill Gates might have the inside track on the US CTO chair.

On the other half of the ticket, I learned something interesting about VP-elect Joe Biden yesterday. Al Gore invented the Internet, but Joe Biden open sourced email encryption!

I'm currently reading Steven Levy's book, Crypto, about the evolution of cryptography in the United States, overcoming pressure and resistance from the NSA and other areas of the United States government's intelligence interests.

Levy writes that Phil Zimmerman was in the finishing stages of productizing PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, an email encryption mechanism that predates our modern GPG (GNU Privacy Guard), when on January 24, 1991, Senator Joseph Biden added a paragraph to Senate Bill 266:

It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufactures of electronic communications services shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plaintext contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law.

Such a law would have eliminated PGP, and aborted countless other technologies we take for granted today (HTTPS, SSL, SSH, VPN).

According to Levy, Zimmerman took this as the ultimate deadline, and quickly finishing PGP, and hoping to get it in the hands of as many people as possible as immediately as possible. To do this, he gave up his short-term hopes of financial benefit from PGP in order to further the long term goal of ensuring private email communications. And on May 24, 1991, he effectively open sourced PGP, uploading it to dozens of newsgroup sites on the burgeoning internet. Quite the opposite effect the honorable Senator from Delaware was aiming for...

By June of 1991, a number of civil liberties groups had raised issue with the offending language and (thankfully) it was struck from the bill. And by that time, a few thousand PGP-encrypted emails had been passed around the Internet, and so open source email encryption was born. N.B. Lotus Notes had been doing this for some while, as a proprietary application.

The little things you learn in a Steven Levy book... By the way, I also highly recommend another of his books, Hackers.

:-Dustin

Ubuntu Open Week

I had the privilege of leading an Ubuntu Open Week discussion yesterday in the #ubuntu-classroom, about eCryptfs and Encrypted Private Directories in Intrepid Ibex.

There was healthy discussion, and a lot of great questions.

You can read the logs here:
* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/openweekintrepid/PrivateDirectories

Thanks to all who attended!

:-Dustin

Halloween Costume MeMe

Did anyone else dress up for Halloween?


We went with a Battlestar Galactica theme.

Left to right:

• Dustin - Gaius Baltar
• Kim - Caprica/6
• Marie - Sharon/Boomer
• Josh - Chief Tyrol.

We were going for something like:



Looking forward to the rest of Season 4!

:-Dustin