Day off, got to strike out some of the items in the to-read list.
Free and Open Source Software related stuff
- What's new in GNOME3 and some common Q&A. Mind that the current bleeding-edge latest-and-greatest Fedora 15 Alpha already features it, but not yet with the brand new and somewhat brave removal of the minimize and maximize buttons.
- Some interesting numbers in Linux Leaders: Debian and Ubuntu Derivative Distros: of the four mother distributions, come the derivatives, 63% of which are based on Debian, 15% on RedHat/Fedora, 9% on Slackware and 4% on Gentoo.
- Red Hat (kind of) obfuscates their patches to the kernel, creates some controversy. Technically, they are not violating GPL. Analysis of Red Hat's CTO's blog entry about this, has concluded that they are trying to prevent third parties from selling support for RHCE. CentOS says it's not affected.
Networking related:
- IPv6 on home routers and DSL/cable modems: FAIL. Also, Cisco says all LinkSys equipment released so far does not support IPv6, but the open firmware community disagrees, as both OpenWRT and DD-WRT do.
- Can Large Scale NAT Save IPv4?. The answer is No, if you 're bored to read the entire article. Some of the drawbacks of LSN:
- Rendering of hosts unidentifiable globally, in other words no more web server at home for your precious blog, but also no more wiretapping of your torrent client (you blatant thief!) -at least not without significant mapping effort on the part of the ISP.
- Huge issues with blacklisting IPs (for spam, for trolling, etc) or whitelisting IPs, behind which large NATed networks may lay.
- Some applications will break under the double NATing of the end user's home router and the ISP's LSN.
- Mind that the Greek ISP Otenet is already implementing IPv6 on end customers, and has a useful set of Q&A, as well as a list of tested and untested CPEs. Also, ARIN has an IPv6 CPEs list on its wiki.
- It's old news that Libya got off the net, but the way they did is was interesting: throttling of bandwidth to 0.
Misc geek reading:
- The Google car was demonstrated recently, but I 'm thinking that the iCar will make it to the market sooner, it will be all-white and round-cornered and its users will boast that it never crashes.
- I really dig internet stories that involve Cyprus. Get this: the largest Russian online payments processing entity, ChronoPays, was running scareware subsidiaries to scam users into paying for useless software, and the payments for those rogue anti-virus software was processed in Cyprus by two companies named Yioliant Holdings and Flytech Classic Distribution Ltd.
- Mixed good & bad news from Microsoft: they are urging users to ditch IE6 (the good news) but they are encouraging its replacement with IE9 (the wtf? news). Dear Microsoft, beware! This is bad for karma, you will be reborn as Windows Millennium!
- Lastly, I liked this guy's gaming PC, even though I am not a gamer any more.