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<H1><A NAME="answer">
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<font color="#B03060">The Answer Gang</font>
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<H4>By Jim Dennis, Ben Okopnik, Dan Wilder, Breen, Chris, and the Gang,
the Editors of Linux Gazette...
and You!
<br>Send questions (or interesting answers) to
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<H3>Contents:</H3>
<dl>
<dt><a href="#tag/greeting"
><strong>¶: Greetings From Heather Stern</strong></A></dl>
<DL>
<!-- index_text begins -->
<dt><A HREF="tag/1.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>Q: avoid getting answers from apropos in the man sections 3 and 3x</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/2.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>"crypt" function in Linux</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/3.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
></a>I think this would be a common problem at least is has been for me
--or--
<dd><A HREF="tag/3.html"
><strong>Dependency Hell</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/4.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>Is This a Good Book for Linux Programming?</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/5.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>What ISPs Do We Use for Linux</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/6.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>How to let the world find your Linux Server when using DHCP</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/7.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>trouble w/ dual boot</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/8.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
></a>Any good resources on laptop hardware support? --or--
<dd><A HREF="tag/8.html"
><strong>HOWTO find a good laptop</strong></a>
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<A NAME="tag/greeting"><HR WIDTH="75%" ALIGN="center"></A>
<H3 align="left"><img src="../gx/dennis/hbubble.gif"
height="50" width="60" alt="(¶) " border="0"
>Greetings from Heather Stern</H3>
<!-- begin hgreeting -->
<p> Ouch.
<p>
The world trade center in shambles. The financial community is still
mostly in shock. The airline industry is rightfully quite horrified.
I know <em>I'm</em> horrified...
<p>
What can we, members of the free software community, do?
<p>
I know a lot of sites have put up banners linking to various helpful
organizations, the Red Cross, funds for the families of all the
emergency personnel killed, and so on. So much in fact, that I wonder
how many charities will go short shrift of donations, clothes, and
other things, simply because this one presently has everyone's attention.
<p>
But that's what we do <em>as people</em>. As a <em>community</em> we
can do a lot more. <a href="http://www.slashdot.org/">Slashdot</a>
did great on keeping us all in tune with the news, when the routers
in front of almost every major news service were going into meltdown.
People used IRC and websites to find out if friends were alive and well,
I saw wikis, I saw email lists briefly stop talking about the topic
of the moment and reserve the day for traffic about who was okay. Now
this didn't just mean wondering whether anybody died in New York. For
instance, a friendly soul from the GNOME Usability Project was trapped
in China for 6 days longer than he expected... making it to our user
group meeting just in time, I might add, but I think it probably
dampened his enthusiasm for our chinese food.
<p>
We're an international community, and now an international problem that
has existed for a long time has been made more obvious. These people
that took these planes used little that was unavailable to Cro Magnon
Man. I'll update them to the Bronze Age because they found a cheat
sheet for how to not be followed - but we're still talking tribal
hunters, not 21st century "agents" from The Matrix.
<p>Yet there are these pushes to "wiretap" email. (See the Crypto-Gram
Newsletter, <a href="http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-109a.html"
>http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-109a.html</a>
for some details.) The ultra-protectionism
of Big Corporate copyrights continues (you think the
<a href="http://www.educause.edu/issues/dmca.html"
>Digital Millenium Copyright Act</a>, already passed
and being enforced, is bad? Look at the bill
"<a href="http://216.110.42.179/docs/hollings.090701.html"
>SSSCA</a>" up for attention. According to the EFF's Cindy Cohn
it makes the DMCA "look like the Bill Of Rights".) while frankly,
my ability as a real individual who writes about one tune every 2 years,
lyrics a little more often, and at least one article a month, to
continue to enforce my OWN copyrights and fair use rights under the
US Code, Title 17
(<a href="http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/index.html"
>http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/index.html</a>)
continues straight into the gutter.
My expectation of safety when I visit a foreign country obviously won't
be based on the idea that I was an invited speaker -- as far as I know,
anybody who was trapped in another city because all flights were grounded
has gotten home now, even the ones who took a taxi From Chicago to Los
Angeles -- but Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian citizen, continues to live
trapped in the USA because eBooks can't be sold in Russia unless you
can make a backup of them, and he agreed to TALK about how the encryption
works on US soil.
<p>
<strong>NOW</strong> I'm terrified.
<p>Of course most of my email lives a very public life already. But let's
face it, a translucent dime store postcard written on in big black marker
has more privacy than the average internet Joe. It's not a federal
felony to hassle a small town ISP because they don't want to let you
wiretap all of their customers just because you have a warrant on one of
them. (We'll leave out whether the "up to something" they might
be up to is about real life-and-death matters or merely about someone
wanting to play Mom for us.) It's not a federal crime to impersonate
being someone important so that your spam gets into a victim's box.
Hey, I may dislike spam a great deal, but it's just a delete button,
okay? He's said his piece and I ignore it. We paint over graffiti
on the walls of small towns, no attention, no fanfare, and eventually
the spams die. End of story.
<p>
Soon, however, it may be a federal crime -- penalty, to lose most of
your rights of US citizenship forever -- to deface a website. HELLO
real world! This is about equivalent to "joyriding". Give 'em some
community service and get on with life. Goodness knows what level of
punishment they have in mind for someone who
believes that mail containing things about money matters really ought
to be in an envelope that can't be steamed open, even in the figurative
sense of cyberspace. (If you don't use PGP or
<a href="http://www.gnupg.org/">GnuPG</a> already, establish
the habit now. Free interoperable clients for MSwin and Mac:
<a href="http://www.pgp.com/products/freeware/default.asp"
>http://www.pgp.com/products/freeware/default.asp</a>)
Or that we have a reasonable expectation of privacy and freedom to
assemble as a group for any other reason. Or that the business
transactions of any US company are none of any other company's or
country's direct business,
unless some sort of model of trust exists between them.
Join the <a href="http://www.eff.org/">Electronic Frontier Foundation</a>
and keep up on other resources about what is going on. As a group we
have a better chance. (There are other privacy related groups out there
too. <a href="http://www.cato.org/">Cato.org</a>, the
<a href="http://www.aclu.org/">American Civil Liberties Union</a>,
and Europeans might consider checking out the Justis database,
<a href="http://www.justis.com/database/european_law.html"
>http://www.justis.com/database/european_law.html</a>. I'm sorry
I can't read other languages or surely I'd have more pointers...)
<p>
The electronic 'zines I'm subscribed to were singing the praises of the
IT staff who arranged for businesses to go onward regardless of the
chaos. They're only just starting to notice the drastic legislation
that's trying to come down the pipe on a wave of patriotism, duty, and
budget-grubbing. I work with and know a lot of sysadmins. I can tell
you that a lot of sysadmins right now don't like the idea of being
put in a tight spot: as a cop, with none of the legal defenses a cop
has for doing his job; as a carrier of bits, with none of the legal
defenses of a telphony Common Carrier for the fact that we are not the
origin of any of this information; as an implementor of company policy,
and a professional with special skills, but without the defense of
"client privilege" that other professions enjoy.
<p>A number of legislators are quite up in arms over the idea that they
are being asked to vote on these matters without enough time to read
all the horrid little details. However, some seem to want this extra
time so they have a chance to draft their own pet departments, see
<a href="http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/ap/20010920/us/attacks_terrorism_laws_3.html">http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/ap/20010920/us/attacks_terrorism_laws_3.html</a>. Call your reps now and make sure that whatever does finally get
drafted actually defends and supports <em>you</em>. I'm sad to say that
email probably isn't enough -- you can try it, but they get a ton, and it
carries little emotional power. Use a phone and <strong>talk</strong>
to these people.
<p>
While a proposed bill isn't exactly
"closed source" it is pretty much what something huge like OpenOffice
or the linux kernel is to someone uninitiated to the wizardry of C and
perhaps even deeply experienced in the same. Of course in <em>our</em>
scope we have all sorts of utilities to help us manage large projects
and sort through things. So what I'd love to see is some sort of
"pretty print" style parser that goes over proposed bills and exposes
the described crimes, regulations, penalties and so on to a bit of
serious debugging. The "sources" are readable by anyone on THOMAS,
<a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/">http://thomas.loc.gov/</a>;
although goodness knows if those are up to date with what is being
argued on the Congress floor, it's a start. I'm sure somebody out
there can give it a shot!
<p><em>On a somewhat more local note, we had many more threads than this,
in fact I am amazed at the percentage of incoming questions that we
answered. But I just got all boiled up and had to let off the
above rant. On the plus side my scripts are doing better by
far than last month. So I have picked some highly juicy ones
and hope you'll forgive me the short list. We have new
<a href="tag/bios.html">Biographies</a>
for the Answer Gang, too, so you can get a sense of who answers
your questions here.</em></p>
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<BR>Published in issue 71 of <I>Linux Gazette</I> October 2001</H5>
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