[Discuss] Hey, Bernie...

[Patrick]

Hi.  :-)

Still there?  Sorry, I didn't mean to put you down or discourage
your interest in security.  It's just that trying to secure an
inherently insecure system [with firewall, FlashBlock, antivirus,
anti-adware, anti-malware, anti-spyware, anti-etc-ware, daily
scans of your entire drive, software to monitor the execution of
every process, all the time, just in case it's up to something...]
can lead to a certain degree of, you know... insecurity.  :-\  You
can spend more time looking over your shoulder than actually
doing what you wanted to, and that's no fun.

Just saying, you don't have to.

But just for the hell of it, just to see what you'd end up with,
just because you can -- if you *want* to take an already-hardened
distro and make it *bomb-proof*, hey right on!  :-)  Go for it.
Go completely mad-scientist with it.  Have fun; I'd like to see
what you come up with.

On that note, here's a little source of inspiration;
    http://www.dave.org/oldplans.html
    [just the top item, the `Information Superhighway' one]

Another one...
    http://www.ee.uwa.edu.au/~roberto/teach/cos214/misc/autodealers.txt

And finally, probably my favourite excerpt from any speech,
ever...

	National Academy of Sciences
	Convocation on Technology and Education
	Washington D. C.,  May 10, 1993

	BRUCE STERLING:

	     Hello ladies and gentlemen.  Thank you for having the
	two of us here  and giving us a license to dream in public.

	     The future is unwritten.  There are best-case
	scenarios.  There are worst-case scenarios.  Both of them
	are great fun to write about if you're a science fiction
	novelist, but neither of them ever happen in the real world.
	What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case
	scenario.
	[...]
	     Let me give you a truly lovely, joyful example of the
	sideways-case scenario.

	     The Internet.  The Internet we make so much of today --
	the global Internet which has helped scholars so much, where
	free speech is flourishing as never before in history -- the
	Internet was a Cold War military project.  It was designed
	for purposes of military communication in a United States
	devastated by a Soviet nuclear strike.  Originally, the
	Internet was a post-apocalypse command grid.

	     And look at it now.  No one really planned it this way.
	[...]  It's as if some grim fallout shelter had burst open
	and a full-scale Mardi Gras parade had come out.  Ladies and
	gentlemen, I take such enormous pleasure in this that it's
	hard to remain properly skeptical.

From;
    https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/William_Gibson/sterling_gibson_nas.speeches

Enjoy your free tank.  :-)



Cheers,

Patrick.
-- 
<netgod> you know
<netgod> its really sad when the internic itself cant configure
DNS servers right
<netgod> it just doesnt get any more pathetic than that