- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a></div>
- <div class="date">17th June 2013</div>
- <div class="body"><p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
-Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
-globe. And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
-<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
-#debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
-worked. We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
-help us with translations. And today I managed to get an interview
-with him, to learn more about him.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
-which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
-party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
-friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
-country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
-community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
-began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
-constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
-field.</p>
-
-<p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
-provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
-activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
-of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
-software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
-the only one we have in our country.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
-even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
-it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
-educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
-love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
-technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
-ways to contribute.</p>
-
-<p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
-configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
-haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
-areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
-software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
-one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
-environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
-for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
-from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
-have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
-maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
-took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
-Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
-time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
-with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
-out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
-it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
-
-<p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
-availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
-scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
-only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
-lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
-project.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
-disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
-project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
-a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story. I'd like to see
-Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
-ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
-lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
-opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
-to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
-
-<p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
-with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
-to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
-on.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
-daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
-am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
-Enlightenment project a lot!),
-<a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
-use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
-<a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
-get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
-stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
-now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
-that:</p>
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a></div>
+ <div class="date">29th January 2014</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
+encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
+central control. It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
+activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth. At least
+I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
+details of every transaction are kept forever. This point is
+investigated in
+<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
+from December 2013, in the article
+"<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
+Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
+Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
+Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. They
+analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
+addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
+of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
+money end up. This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+<p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
+our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
+activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
+Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
+flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
+address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
+we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
+thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
+mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
+tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
+large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
+from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
+
+<p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
+which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
+the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
+case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
+subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
+stolen bitcoins were deposited. Because such exchanges seem to serve
+as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
+few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
+money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
+present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
+</blockquote><p>
+
+<p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
+transaction log. The 2011 paper
+"<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
+the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
+summarized like this:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+"Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
+complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
+public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
+attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
+public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
+users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
+a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
+allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
+this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
+derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
+two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
+complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
+anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
+techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
+an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
+market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
+is anonymous. It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites. Use
+cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
+sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+</div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a></div>
+ <div class="date">14th January 2014</div>
+ <div class="body"><p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
+find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
+analysis. It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
+useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
+the source. The company behind it provide
+<a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
+a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
+already checked. A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
+the Coverity system, and discovered that the
+<a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
+<a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
+projects I am involved with was already registered. But these are
+fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
+check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
+checking of the chrpath project</a>. It was
+added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects. Six of
+these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
+error. Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
+of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
+is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
+the future end up in a library. Having fixed all defects and added
+<a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
+mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
+publish a new release. These are the release notes:</p>
+
+<p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff