So, SBC somehow broke their DNS servers, so I can't get to my department's website from home. I can't reach it by FTP or by HTTP, which means I'm pretty much dead in the water. I can, however, reach the Linux server I set up in our office, and that computer CAN see our website; however, I can only reach that computer through port 22, the secure port which encrypts all traffic.

BUT: with the magic of port forwarding and SSH tunnelling, I can set up a couple of connections that will route my requests to localhost:xxxxx to the remote website. So, under this setup, I can go to http://localhost:10030 and browse to my department's website as if I were connected to it directly. I can use the same trick to get to the FTP port and the SSH port.

For the technologically curious, you can do this by executing the following command at a shell prompt:

$ ssh -f -N -L xxxx:yyyyy.yyy:zz uuuuu@rrrrrrrr.rrr

where:

xxxxx = the local port number you want to use
yyyyy.yyy = the remote host you need to connect to that you can't see
zz: the desired port on the remote host
rrrrrrr.rrr = the remote host you're using as your bridging connection
uuuuu = your user login on rrrrrrr.rrr.

Of course, that requires that port forwarding be enabled on rrrrrrr.rrr. I set that up some time ago for certain other nefarious purposes of mine.

The challenge, then, is to find a way to do this in Windows. Difficulty: no money to be spent on software (I use OpenSSH from the OpenBSD project) or operating systems (all three computers involved in my setup run *Nix variants).

Via ellipticcurve, this laugh riot about how Linux is a commiepinkoislamicantiamerican threat to the American software industry.

I'm about 90% sure this is a parody.

Over the past month or so, I've been sick with a persistent URI (though my doctor and I are working on a different theory now -- more on that some other time), and I've been taking advantage of the situation to rewatch all seven seasons of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Right now, I'm just over halfway through season six of Buffy. It is certainly different and darker than earlier seasons. I can see why many fans didn't care for this season very much, but I like it just as much as, say, first or third seasons. The demons are more representative of the dark side of reality, I think, and the metaphors are more explicit. I also like the deepened characterizations and the darkened themes. Life is hard at times, and everyone knows this. We all go through periods like this when we're adolescents, times when we feel like our friends are deserting us, when we aren't sure what's the right thing to do, when we have to take crap jobs just to keep our heads above water, and so on.

Currently, I'm watching the episode called "Normal Again", in which Buffy is infected by a demon's venom which makes her believe she's in a mental hospital, and the whole Sunnydale experience has been an hallucination. One of the most telling scenes, I think, which encapsulates the entire season in a few brilliant seconds, is when Buffy has the chance to drink the antidote, but after a chewing out by Spike, she just dumps the antidote into a nearby trash can. During those dark times of our lives, we all probably entertain the happy idea that everything we're going through is just a dream or a mind trip; I know that there have certainly have been times when I've wished that everything that's happened to me since 7th grade was just a dream. This one scene represents a moment when Buffy chooses the fantasy over the painful reality, even if the fantasy itself is painful. The reality of her situation, of the poverty, of the wage slave job, of the friendships imploding, of her relationship with Spike, all of that is just too painful; she chooses to believe instead that everything she's experienced has just been a dream in a psych ward. One of the most poignant scenes in this episode is a flashback to the mental hospital when Joyce, Buffy's dead mother, tells her that "the world looks like a hard place", giving her a pep talk to bring her back to "reality". They are the words of a loving mother. And then Buffy chooses the Sunnydale life again over the mental ward. She affirms reality and her role in it, affirming herself. I think this really marks the beginning of Buffy's recovery from the trauma of being brought back to life at the beginning of the season; and this recovery of her confidence and her self affirmation are essential to setting up the final season of the series.

Of course, there's also that little scene at the end of the episode back in the mental hospital with the catatonic Buffy and the doctor saying, "I'm afraid we've lost her." It's a nifty little mindfuck, and I'm always up for one of those. But it also reasserts the episode's theme, and, I think, one of the central themes of the entire season (and possibly the series): coming to terms with yourself, even if the alternative seems more pleasant. As we've seen throughout the entire series, Buffy's always wanted to be just a normal girl, and not have the duties and responsibilities of being the Slayer; yet, when given the opportunity, she chooses Slayer-hood over a potentially different existence which seemed, at least for just a moment, more pleasant.

So, yeah, this season isn't as purely entertaining in a "gosh wow yippee ha ha ha" sort of way as the earlier seasons were. But for me, the deeper characterizations and explorations of darker themes makes it more enjoyable for me.

This is a controversial position, I know. But then I also really enjoyed the season finale of BSG, and I thought the series finale for Angel was brilliant.

In other news: I've been busy with work, and with personal IT projects. I got it into my head to upgrade my desktop workstation to the latest beta release of Kubuntu, otherwise known as "Dapper Drake". I upgraded to "Flight 5", which is still a beta release, and thus inherently unstable. This required two reinstalls, since the first time I made a critical error which resulted in the removal of nearly two dozen key libraries, making KDE -- and X, really -- unusable. I learned my lesson there. But after two days of tinkering and messing around I've got my system back to a stable place, though I'm still not happy with how some GTK applications, like Firefox, are presented in KDE. And Konqueror is a touch unstable still. And I haven't been successful in setting up file associations to launch the proper applications when I click on a link to a file on my desktop. Kind of annoying. Oh, and setting up udev so that newly connected USB devices work properly took a few hours of tinkering and research, and I almost gave up and reverted when I just couldn't get MP3's to play. Turns out the new core system along with the latest beta release of Amarok required eight new libraries to decode MP3's, instead of the two that were required before.

I've also been working on a web-based submissions tracker for my writing. That's been fun.

And, of course, I've been sick, and I've also been really busy with work. Hence my non-communicativeness over the past couple of weeks.

All of this, of course, is basically a way of saying that I've been avoiding revising Fred, Again. ;)

This article by Bruce Schneier is a good discussion of Sony's recent rootkit DRM fiasco (which, ironically, in trying to protect copyright itself violated copyright laws related to the GPL) and a good discussion of why corporate arrogance is the true malware infecting our society.

Makes me gladder than ever that I'm a Linux/OSS geek.

For those who don't know, SCO is a distributor of a Unix operating system which, by all accounts, sucks. Now, SCO is not the same SCO which a few years ago created this same operating system and sold the rights to Novell, and then became Caldera and began distributing a version of Linux. It was in 2002 that SCO -- the current SCO -- dropped their Linux distribution, realized that they weren't making any money at all, and hired a fellow named Darl McBride whose past employment history as CEO for various companies generally consisted of taking over those companies and taking them in new, exciting, litigious directions. So, Caldera became SCO and hired Darl and dropped Linux and updated their business model.

In other words, in 2002, SCO decided to sue anyone who was using Linux, claiming that Linux incorporates part of their Unix source code and therefore infringes on intellectual property owned by SCO-which-isn't-SCO-but-is. They claimed to have documented evidence that the source code for Linux contained source code for Unix, word for word and byte for byte. However, they refused to release this evidence, choosing instead to take the issue all the way to court; at no point have they released their evidence to anyone, not even the courts. Yet they continue to claim, and to litigate. They pursued their lawsuits, they had the gall to institute "Linux licensing fees", saying that anyone who wanted to use Linux had to pay them, and so on.

A document, dated 2002, has recently surfaced, written by a consultant to SCO prior to this entire debacle. Prior even to the hiring of Darl McBride. This document stated clearly that the Linux source code had been thoroughly investigated (because it IS open source, so anyone can look at it), and that no weapons of mass destruction -- oops, excuse me, I mean instances of proprietary Unix source code had been found.

So, even lacking evidence that wrongdoing had been committed -- in fact, in the face of evidence directly to the contrary -- a large corporation decided to press ahead with lawsuits and claims. In 2002, when Darl McBride announced that the corporation had evidence that Linux infringed on SCO proprietary source code, he was a bald-faced liar, and he knew it. Quoting Darl McBride: "We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code... we're finding code that looks likes it's been obfuscated to make it look like it wasn't UnixWare code--but it was."

The question has been raised: how can a corporation possibly push forward with such ludicrous actions in direct contrast to what they know to be true? Well, considering the following line:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

In context, it's easy to see how SCO and Darl McBride can think they can get away with it. Consider the moral example they have at the top.

(The SCO case is actually a really interesting one, filled with corporate drama, with liars and deceivers and hucksters, with co-opted journalists "outing" people who shouldn't be outed, and more. All it's lacking, really, is bloodshed. Thank God.)