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The company hosting my server hiked their rates by 8% a while ago and now they’re set to jump by another 28%, with absolutely no value added. I’m waiting for a new server elsewhere to get activated and then I’ll move all my stuff again. A quick glance at their support forum confirms that I’m not the only unhappy soon-to-be-ex customer.
Given that the remaining IPV4 addresses deplete faster than the world’s oil reserves, and given all these tunnel brokers that give away free /64 and even /48 routeable networks, I figured I might as well try to see what it takes to get both a home network and the dedicated server running on IPV6. Sooner rather later there will be enormous pressure to migrate to IPV6 and I want to have lots of hands-on experience by then.
The server itself is rather painless. Setting up a tunnel is quite easy and it’s fun having a /64 to play with (that’s a network with four billion times the possible IP# than the entire IPV4 address space). I had to install a patch for the DNS software that I run and it seems to take a long time to propagate the AAAA records to the offsite secondary DNS servers. On the up side, it’s straightforward to make apache listen on IPV6 addresses and I’ll serve all my sites on IPV6 in addition to IPV4 soon.
If you have IPV6, try this: http://ipv6.fallacio.us/
If you don’t, get yours at go6.net or Hurricane Electric.
The home network proves a bit more of a challenge. It’s not hard at all to get an Internet-routeable IPV6 going; as long as you run a contemporary version of Unix (say Linux, Solaris, one of the BSDs) or Windows XP and later, the dual stack is the least of the problems. Most personal firewalls and virus checkers on Windows don’t support IPV6—or if they do, that feature is cleverly hidden. As far as Linux is concerned, it takes a kernel later than 2.6.20 to build a stateful packet filter (read: firewall). Or just use OpenBSD.
Anyway, so far running dual-stacks seems anticlimatic. The real headache is how to get an IPV6-only device to talk to IPV4 and vice versa, though.
Imagery in Bastrop school mural stirs controversy
A mural meant to bring people together is causing a rift in the Bastrop community.
The painting in question, a student project completed in 2003, adorns a wall in the corridor leading to the Bastrop High School gym. It depicts the sometimes unpleasant history of the town, showing scenes of a Mexican and Comanche raid and slaves working in a cotton field, as well as unifying visions of children of different ethnicities reaching out to one another.
Bastrop school board members were surprised when almost a dozen district residents who signed up to speak at a community forum Tuesday evening wanted to talk about the mural, some calling for its removal on religious grounds and others with arguments for keeping it up.
Trustees hadn’t heard of the controversy — district offices first received a complaint a couple weeks ago — but high school hallways are buzzing.
Patty Green, the art teacher who coordinated the project, said she doesn’t understand why the issue is coming up now. Austin muralist Raul Valdez organized a group of Bastrop students to paint the mural using a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bastrop Association for the Arts.
“It sat up there for five years, and nobody had a problem with it,” said Green, the head of the Bastrop association.
Just reading thus far, it’s obvious that a Christian True Believer™ just his or her knickers in a twist because they either just hate the idea of other religions having their cameo and/or they’re also Texan “patriots” and don’t like the state’s unrevised history.
Bastrop resident Lauren Hansell, who made the original complaint, homeschools her children but visits the school on Fridays to pray with students at the flagpole.
The plot thickens. Homeschools implies fundie.
A Christian, Hansell said she wants the mural removed because of the war and slavery scenes and depictions of Buddha and ancient gods. Hansell said girl’s basketball coach Dee Deshay pointed out the mural as a potential problem.
And there you have it. A Texan fundie who objects to unrevised history and doesn’t like other religions getting some exposure.
“When she showed it to me, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ ” said Hansell, who added that the mural presents a new age idea of peace and unity that could be confusing to Christian students. Hansell said she’d also like a more positive image of African Americans. “It doesn’t even represent even a fingernail of the faith here in Bastrop County and what (residents) believe.”
Oh my gosh indeed. The idea of peace and unity could be confusing to Christian students? As in, like, they may not sign up for a tour of glory in Iraq? They may be confused because there are religions other than (fundamentalist) Christianity? And all those Negro folks should be portrayed in a more positive way—like the slavery never happened and these blighted savages have been converted to Christianity?
Among the images on the mural are an Aztec sun, ancient Egypt’s King Tutankhamen, Buddha and Shiva, a Hindu deity, dancing on a demon of ignorance.
Hansell, who at first interpreted Shiva’s dance as a message in favor of abortion, said laws that bar Christian symbols from public schools should apply to the mural.
Yup, there’s somebody going out of her way to find something to be offended about.
The First Amendment, which bans government-sponsored religious activities even as it protects religious expression from government interference, allows students to pray during school in informal settings, according to U.S. Department of Education guidelines. The guidelines say students have the right to “express their beliefs about religion in the form of homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments free of discrimination based on the religious content of their submissions.”
Valdez, the muralist, said the purpose of the project was to represent the history and cultural unity in Bastrop. Although no one symbol can represent a culture, he said the students chose the mural’s imagery to represent unity.
“It just so happens (the symbols) were religious,” Valdez said.
Former school board member Carol Schumacher, whose daughter helped with the mural, said the attempt to take the painting down is an indication of a pervasive Christian influence in the schools that also manifests in the recitation of prayers before school board meetings.
I can just image the screams of outrage is somebody complained about these prayers. There’s no doubt about the pervasive Christian fundamentalist influence here in Texas and this is just another example. Had the mural only shown Christian themes, the same people would fight tooth and nail to keep it if somebody objected to it.
Bastrop High School senior Ashley Crawford said that when she looks at the mural, she thinks about history. Crawford said the mural has been left free of graffiti, which she sees as a sign of respect.
However, some students have signed a petition asking that the mural be removed.
As Mandi Colvin, a sophomore at Bastrop High, sees it: “It’s breaking the First Amendment. It needs to come down.”
And there’s a sophomore who parrots what her parents force-fed her. I think Dawkins has it right—indoctrinating children with religion is a form of child abuse. Some will snap out of it, but all too many are stunted for life.
I have to mention a blog I discovered:
This woman is strangely compelling, to the point where I’ve been obsessively reading the whole damn archive. While I don’t agree with absolutely everything she says, for some reason I don’t mind reading it, even as bluntly as she says it.
If she ever met me, she would probably tell me I was a fucking idiot, and I would humbly respond, with a secret feeling of relief, “Yes, you’re right, I am a fucking idiot.”
Go see for yourselves, that’s all I can say.
I want to buy a Barack Obama bracelet, but they’re only offered in black and white. WHICH ONE SHOULD I CHOOSE??
EFF published this article: Protecting Yourself From Suspicionless Searches While Traveling and the German-language Heise website reports that these searches and data copying aren’t uncommon: Proteste gegen Datenschnüffelei an US-Grenzen.
Considering how much personal information U.S. authorities receive about travelers before they even board a plane, long-pending suspicions that intelligence services feed back information to businesses, and the copying of data, a business traveler has to assume that the U.S. customs and border patrol engages in industrial espionage. Even a private person has good reason not to trust U.S. authorities with personal data. So what to do? I suppose it depends on your level of paranoia.
I myself would follow simple rules.
Leave all gadgets at home that you don’t need. Do not take anything that you couldn’t afford to replace if it gets impounded.
DBAN all media that can be before you leave and re-install laptops with a bare-bones load-out.
If a device gets searched, particularly out of your sight, consider it compromised. Re-install it after clearing customs. You did bring read-only installation media, didn’t you?
Have arrangements in place to pick up and drop off encrypted data from home. Do not carry cryptographic keys on media, but download them (encrypted or over an encrypted connection). The use of one-time keys is very attractive in this case. Similarly, drop off encrypted data before you return.
DBAN any media and re-install from scratch before returning. If your devices get searched on the outbound trip, DBAN and re-install again.
If you can run a laptop as a thin client across an encrypted connection, so much the better. Remember, one-time passwords and two-factor authentication are your friends.
The long and short of it is I don’t trust either the U.S. or European governments to not snoop beyond the limits of my tolerance. I’m not likely to do any international travel in the foreseeable future, but I would make absolutely sure I’d carry no personal data whatsoever across a border checkpoint. Also, any device that’s handled by a border agent, particularly when out of sight, is not to be trusted anymore. It’s a major PITA, but it still beats sharing personal data with government snoops.
First, there’s this guy:
Cardinal calls for new dialogue between believers and non-believers
‘Respect atheists’, says cardinal
I’m not sure what he wants to have a dialog about. This is not a good start:
God is not a “fact in the world” as though God could be treated as “one thing among other things to be empirically investigated” and affirmed or denied on the “basis of observation”, said Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor.
Be that as it may, it looks like he didn’t get the memo:
Atheists are nice people who will roast in hell, says Cardinal
ATHEISTS and agnostics are decent people whose tormented souls will burn for all eternity in the scorching fires of hell, Britain’s biggest catholic said last night.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor said non-believers should be respected, right up to the point of death when they will finally come face to face with Satan and his blood-soaked pitchfork.
He told a conference in London: “Those without faith should not be shunned or abused. Jesus and Beelzebub are already cooking something up for them, don’t you worry about that.”
Whatever, dude. For an outfit that produced (is the past tense really justified?) and shelters child rapists, that’s an awfully tall horse you’re riding.
British Airways takes beef off the menu to avoid offending Hindus
For decades the national dish has been a staple meal on the national carrier.
But now British Airways has taken beef off the menu for economy passengers amid concerns about its “religious restrictions”.
The airline has instead switched to a fish pie or chicken dish option for the so-called “cattle class” passengers.
BA’s second-biggest long-haul market is to India, where the majority Hindu population do not eat beef because of their beliefs.
However, the article ends with these paragraphs:
“That said, Hindus are tolerant of the beliefs of others and do not expect everyone to stop eating a food because they do not eat it.”
In the past three months world beef prices have risen from about £2,500 a tonne to more than £4,000 a tonne, largely because of the weakening dollar and rising feed costs.
BA also said that cost is not a reason for the decision to stop serving beef.
Yeah, right. Since they only took beef off the menu in the “cattle class”, I’m deeply skeptical about any claims that cost didn’t figure into the decision.
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