Rubenerd

This post was roughly adapted from a letter I’ve sent to my local MP and senators. I’m releasing this post into the public domain; copy as much as you want if you find it useful.

The Australian Government passed its anti-encryption bill last week, thanks to the utter capitulation of our weak as piss opposition. With it, we’ve become the first developed country with laws that can compel a company employee to install technological backdoors, and without being able to disclose to their employer or clients.

Thanks to the Greens, Centre Alliance, and independents who voted against it in the Senate and House of Representatives. The former have earned another year’s membership from me.

Pardon the French, but I am fucking furious. I know I’ll be preaching to the choir here, but its for the following reasons:

1. It’s a step backwards for civil liberties. In the words of Thomas Jefferson from my friends in the US, those who sacrifice security for privacy deserve neither. These steps damage us more than any terrorist could; an irony utterly lost on these halfwits.

2. It’s unenforcable, and mathematically impossible if cryptographic systems were done correctly. If there’s any silver lining here, the government are unaware of this, willfully or otherwise.

3. It’s a poison pill for Australian IT. Already reeling from the shambles of the NBN, now we have to contend with the image of having a government hostile to privacy and business.

4. It’s ripe for abuse. Government and law officials have already been caught abusing metadata, and they will certainly do here too.

5. It’s another mathematical certainly that you can’t build a back door without also letting in bad actors through the same door. Terrorists couldn’t have engineered a weakening of our systems as effective as this.

6. It puts secured communications at risk. Banking is the obvious example. So much for the centre-right Liberal party being business friendly.

7. It concedes all our moral high ground when engaging diplomatically with regimes that implement draconian laws. Though in the defence of the Government, this hasn’t bothered them before.

8. Scope creep is an absolute certainly, given the governments track record with similar legislation.

9. It will drive away privacy-minded companies like Apple. Australia has fewer than 30 million people — smaller than California — so if presented with an untenable situation, they’ll just leave.

10. And the icing on the cake, the legislation will allow learned data to be exported to jurisdictions that enforce the death penalty. I just learned of this a few minutes ago. Fucking unbelievable.

Afterword

If I were forced at gunpoint to play devil’s advocate, the opposition Labor party knows they’ll easily win the election next year. They were already being blamed for siding with terrorists, so agreeing on the bill until next year disarms the government of an attack point. Then when they’re in, they can reverse or change the law.

This strikes me as incredibly optimistic, but Daniel Andrews’ decisive recent win for Labor in the Victoria state election shows they’re capable of staring down terrorism postulations. I hope he can bring Bill Shorten into line by next year.

In the meantime, it is our duty and responsibility to disseminate as much information about this bill as we can. An informed, engaged populace will be our only defence.

Today we bid farewell to the FastWay Supermarket in North Sydney. It opened in early 2018, but didn’t last long before the Woolworths opened less than a block away on Miller Street.

Truth be told I barely shopped there, but the cheerful clipart paper bag made me smile every time. Even though his store is but a twisted mess of empty shelving now, he still lights up each evening.

It’s a shame he couldn’t hold on, I’ll bet he would have had more customers by the time the new Victoria Cross Metro station opened across the street.

Today I learned the de Havilland Comet had a military version. From Wikipedia:

The Hawker Siddeley Nimrod is a maritime patrol aircraft developed and operated by the United Kingdom. It was an extensive modification of the de Havilland Comet, the world’s first operational jet airliner.

The photo above shows a Hawker Siddeley Nimrod MR2, taken by Dale Coleman in 2005 when it was still in service. The vertical and horizontal stabalisers are unrecognisable, though there’s no mistaking those engine intakes.

I’m only interested in civil aviation, but it would have been fun to see a relative of the Comet in service in my lifetime; even one fitted out to resemble a narwhal.

I saw this message in lieu of an Apple Support Communities page. It looks sharp on a Retina screen here because its scaled 50%; the original graphic was stretched like it was living in 2009. Also note the skeuomorphic paper, a term likely 90% of tech pundits didn’t know prior to iOS 7.

Maybe this graphic is one of the things Apple is busy updating.

This is my fantasy manpage for features every *nix shell program should support. I know steering open source software developers is akin to hearding cats, but I think these are reasonable.

RUBENBSD(1)    Rubenerd Commands Manual    RUBENBSD(1)
  
NAME
    cmd - a placeholder for any *nix shell software.  
  
SYNOPSIS
    cmd [--cowsay] [--debug] [--help] [--verbose]  
  
DESCRIPTION
    This is Ruben Schade's wishlist for options that 
    all shell software should implement. If an option 
    clashes with an existing invocation, these options
    must take precedence.   
  
OPTIONS
    --cowsay
        Pipe output to everyone's favourite acme 
        package since xeyes and fortune.
    
    --debug
        Print what your program is doing, in detail.
  
    --help
        Print an option summary. 
 
    --verbose    
        Print what your program is doing.
  
RUBENBSD(1)    Rubenerd Commands Manual    RUBENBSD(1)

Actually, that’s about it. I still like you if you don’t implement verbosity options, but you’re off the Christmas card list.

Speaking of the latest Red Hat Release Notes, here’s a decision that’s a relief rather than a point of sadness:

The Btrfs (B-Tree) file system is available as a Technology Preview in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 introduced the last planned update to this feature. Btrfs has been deprecated, which means Red Hat will not be moving Btrfs to a fully supported feature and it will be removed in a future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Canonical already sought legal advice to permit their use of CDDL-licenced ZFS in their Ubuntu distribution; I wonder if Red Hat will attempt something similar in the future?

Given many of the XFS maintainers now work at Red Hat, it seems likely they’ll keep using that instead; perhaps even extend it. The performance is fantastic, but for data integrity ZFS is still without peer. Including, sadly, Apple’s new APFS.

The IT world has been consumed with thoughts around this proposed IBM Red Hat buyout. But buried towards the end of the release notes for 7.6 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was this bullet point:

KDE Plasma Workspaces (KDE), which has been provided as an alternative to the default GNOME desktop environment has been deprecated. A future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will no longer support using KDE instead of the default GNOME desktop environment.

This feels like the end of an era as well. Red Hat was my first foray into Unix-like operating systems; I bought the carton from Challenger in the late Funan Centre in Singapore, brought it home, and installed it off its many CD-ROMs alongside Windows. I suspect plenty of you have a similar story.

What I haven’t ever really mentioned in my repeated reminiscing on this was my choice of desktop environment. Even in the late 1990s one could choose between the default Gnome environment and KDE. The first time I installed both to try, but quickly chose KDE. I didn’t know about the Qt/GTK split, or licencing backstory, I just thought KDE was more feature complete, attractive, and cohesive.

That carried through to my switch to desktop FreeBSD, until I jumped entirely to Xfce after using Cobind, a desktop that itself was based on Red Hat after the split to form Fedora and RHEL.

Ah Saber, you lent me strength through some troubling years! But I digress.

This discussion of desktop environments leads us to the Bluecurve controversy, pictured above. Red Hat in the early 2000s tried to unify desktop environments, window manager themes, and toolkits with a UI that almost matched. It was an enviable goal, but the execution left KDE fans like me with a feeling they were just trying make it look like Gnome. Later releases did a better job at integration, such that a layperson couldn’t immediately tell amaroK or Konqueror weren’t GTK+ applications. But those early days were rough, and foreshadowed Red Hat’s actions to come.

Anyway my point is Red Hat has a long history with KDE, and it was an important pairing in my own *nix journey. Despite feeling as though it didn’t get the prime billing or attention lavished on Gnome, the Red Hat developers still did a great job providing KDE; even if SuSE offered a better KDE-first distro.

I can understand why they’ve done this, but I’m still a bit sad.

I see what it did there.

Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s two largets cities, have ridiculous housing prices. There’s an irony to a country as vast and underpopulated as Australia having two cities that are among the least affordable in the world.

It manifests in a few ways. Fewer people under the age of thirty own their own house than at any point before World War II. Dwellings that were routingly three to four times the annual wage are now ten to fifteen. The sociological fallout from this will be felt for decades.

And then you have what I consider the biggest visual tell beyond the number of cranes that dot Australian city skylines. No, not that Cities Skylines, though I need to get around to playing that again. I’m going to call it the Rubenerd Vacancy Pile Index, or the number of illegally-dumped refuse piles outside newly vacant houses.

With rent being as high as it is, people are constantly moving to save money or under threat of increases. Such a transient population does not nuture a sense of community; why take pride in your neighbourhood or get to know people if you won’t be there in a year?

North Sydney currently has a three on the Rubenerd Vacancy Pile Index. The council is pretty efficient at clearing it all out quickly, rendering that number that much more impressive. Mascot easily had double digits when I lived there in 2015.

I have no use for, desire to buy, or interest, in minivans. Or at least, I thought so until my binge-watching of Doug DeMuro’s channel lead me to this video of the Mercedes-Benz Metris, sold in Australia and Singapore as the Vino, or Vito, or something. I should probably check.

It’s the perfect case study into a company not listening to the market, especially in light of vastly better alternatives. It’s comically awful, and yet, I couldn’t stop watching. Compare and contrast to Doug’s review of the Honda Odyssey Minivan, with adjustable and fold down seats that are an engineering work of art.