Justisminister Knut Storberget har nylig sendt et brev til norske internettleverandører der han ber dem om "frivillig" å ta i bruk Kripos' filtreringsteknologi, som i dag benyttes til å sensurere webtjenere som antas å spre barnepornografisk materiale. Dersom leverandørene ikke stiller seg i rekke vil han tvinge dem til det ved å «innføre et lovpålegg som påbyr filtrering, særlig av overgrepsbilder mot barn.».

From time to time, having the ability to test your projects on a home lab system is a very good thing. In my home lab, I'm doing everything from testing small web-based projects to simulations of large-scale deployments.

There are two major, open source solutions for Linux that I care enough to think about when it comes to virtualization, Xen and KVM. Xen is in my opinion best suited for a datacenter environment, when the sole purpose of the box is to host virtualized guests, but it needs a patched kernel, and using X on a xenified kernel (for example when the same box is used as your livingroom multimedia center) is a pain, especially if you're on NVIDIA.

The kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) is provided with the stock Linux kernel, and provides full virtualization on machines with Intel VT or AMD-V CPUs. It also works fine in tandem with X and other applications. I have been using KVM (and kqemu) for a long time, but I've been basing my usage on manually doing the provisioning on the command line. That grew to be a series of long, mundane tasks, especially when I needed to provision several guests at the same time.

I made a couple of scripts to make it easier to provision a series of Ubuntu guests based on a LVM logical volume with a base image. The provisioning script creates a snapshot of this base image, mounts and modifies essential files directly on the guest filesystem, and creates an init-script in /etc/init.d.

Today, on August 6, it is exactly 63 years since the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. On August 9, it dropped yet another nuke on Nagasaki. The U.S. president Harry Truman went on the radio to claim: «The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.»

A "military base"? Avoiding killing civilians? Hiroshima was a large, metropolitan area, and the largest city in the Chugoku region of western Honshu, the largest of Japan's islands. By the end of 1945, the nukes had killed 220.000 people, where half of them perished in the blasts and the rest by radiation and other reasons attributed to the bombs.

This is exactly what Truman wanted. The military "target commitee" led by Robert Oppenheimer «[...] agreed that psychological factors in the target selection were of great importance [...] obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan [...] making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized [...] Kyoto has the advantage of the people being more highly intelligent and hence better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon. Hiroshima has the advantage of being such a size and with possible focussing from nearby mountains that a large fraction of the city may be destroyed.»

«Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history.»
Noam Chomsky - The Responsibility of Intellectuals, 1967

To this day, the bombings have often been accredited as a necessary evil in order to end the war, while mini-nukes are introduced as acceptable munitions for modern warfare. It's all for good; it's us or them. The lies are still there. Are we hiding behind what Richard Falk called «a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen with positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence»?

In less than five days, I'm going to South-East Asia to spend a month relaxing, trekking, inhaling pollution and fighting cockroaches the size of my fist in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. It's going to be wonderful.

My problem is that it is very expensive to call to and from most of the countries in the area. The tariff for a call between a Telenor fixed-line in Norway and my prepaid mobile in Thailand is an outrageous €1.41 (NOK 11.38) per minute. The worldwide telecom tariffs are not based on distance, but destination bandwidth, de-facto monopolies, local regulations, corruption and several other complicated factors. In this case, Telenor really helps out with their typically inflated tariffs. For comparison, the Dutch telecom KPN charges "only" €1.08 (NOK 8.69) for the same call. Nevertheless, the tariffs are unacceptable, and Skype is really not an option, as it's not as flexible and portable as a mobile phone.

This is where broadband telephony like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) comes to the rescue. Thanks to VoIP, there is a market for call termination over internet trunks where prices are slashed to the bone due to the globalized marketplace that internet provides. Now everyone can take international calls at wholesale prices and perhaps become their own little telecom company. By shopping around, I have found VoIP providers that will terminate a call between Norway and Thailand for only €0.0066 (NOK 0.053) per minute, or 0.46% of the Telenor tariff, and even 50% less than the Telenor domestic tariff. I'm laughing all the way to the bank.

If you spend a lot of time reading on the internet, (by that, I don't necessarily mean spending the time browsing people's Facebook oneliners and paying your bills, but actually using it as the information source it is) then you are probably very busy right now, and I'll get right to the point.

Use an aggregator for RSS feeds. It provides you with a clean view of a great deal of sources, from your favourite 100% online newspapers (and their brilliant political comics, like Doonesbury), to these pseudo-attempts of "established" media desperately trying to justify their dual physical/online existance. (Some do this better than others, but I'll save that for a later rant.)