Mike Meredith

Is Islam A Religion Of Peace?

 Religion  No Responses »
Apr 062018
 

The phrase “Islam is a religion of peace” gets bandied about a great deal these days – either by those saying that it is a religion of peace and islamic terrorists are an aberration, or by those who question whether islam is a religion of peace at all.

To be honest though, the phrase is irrelevant. You can have the most peaceable religion in existence and yet fundamentalist followers of that religion will resort to violence, and yes you can have a religion that calls for the torture to death of all non-followers, yet if the followers of that religion are peaceable nobody is at risk.

Questioning the religion as a whole is all very well (and as someone who would prefer that all religions disappear in a puff of logic, usually to be encouraged), but it does tend to encourage the kind of idiot who normally goes in for racism into attacking all muslims (and often sikhs as well) because of the sins of a few.

Muslims are just people; people with the disadvantage that they have been indoctrinated into a faith – not much different to christians, sikhs, hindus, jews, or zorastrians (and if I’ve left out your religion, yes I mean you too). Some are good people; some are bad.

But in the words of Steven Weinberg: “but for good people to do evil—that takes religion”.

But truisms like that are overly simplistic; religious terrorists are people who are convinced that they are good – probably better than their coreligionists – and who want to enforce their beliefs and standards of behaviour on others. And are prepared to do so in ways that most of us would call psychotic.

These people – the religious terrorists – are in all likelihood only a tiny minority of all muslims (or christians, …), and in a surprising number of cases are not especially well educated in their religion. In fact many of them are petty crooks, with a burning desire to be more significant than they deserve.

In the end, debating whether islam really is a religion of peace or not is pretty much a waste of time because it is irrelevant – even the religions with the most peaceful reputations have terrorists (major religions only).

Old Metal 3

An Awesome Window Manager ECC Widget

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Apr 012018
 

This is a continuation of an earlier post regarding ECC memory under Linux, and is how I added a little widget to display the current ECC memory status. Because I don’t really know lua, most of the work is carried out with a shell script that is run via cron on a frequent basis.

The shell script simply runs edac-util to obtain the number of correctable errors and uncorrectable errors, and formats the numbers in a way suitable for setting the text of a widget :-

#!/bin/zsh
#
# Use edac-util to report some numbers to display ...

correctables=$(edac-util --report=ce | awk '{print $NF}')
uncorrectables=$(edac-util --report=ue | awk '{print $NF}')

c="chartreuse"
if [[ "$correctables" != "0" ]]
then 
  c="orange"
fi
if [[ "$uncorrectables" != "0" ]]
then
  c="red"
fi

echo "ECC: $correctables/$uncorrectables "

This is run with a crontab entry :-

*/7 * * * * /site/scripts/gen-ecc-wtext > /home/mike/lib/awesome/widget-texts/ecc-status

Once the file is being generated, the Awesome configuration can take effect :-

-- The following function does what it says and is used in a number of dumb widgets
-- to gather strings from shell scripts
function readfiletostring (filename)
  file = io.open(filename, "r")
  io.input(file)
  s = io.read()
  io.close(file)
  return s
end

eccstatus = wibox.widget.textbox()
eccstatus:set_markup(readfiletostring(homedir .. "/lib/awesome/widget-texts/ecc-status"))
eccstatustimer = timer({ timeout = 60 })
eccstatustimer:connect_signal("timeout",
  function()
      eccstatus:set_markup(readfiletostring(homedir .. "/lib/awesome/widget-texts/ecc-status"))
  end
)
eccstatustimer:start()
...
layout = wibox.layout.fixed.horizontal, ... eccstatus, ...

There plenty of ways this could be improved – there’s nothing really that requires a separate shell script, but this works which is good enough for now.

Exploitation in History

 History  No Responses »
Mar 312018
 

If you read any history at all, you will encounter many incidents of exploitation – the English exploiting the Irish, the Irish exploiting the Scottish (see Dál Riata), the English exploiting the Scottish, the Scottish exploiting the English, everyone exploiting the Welsh, etc.

As an example of how it wasn’t as simple as sometimes claimed, there is a small sliver of Anglo-Irish ancestry in my family history. Undoubtedly they exploited the Irish back in the 18th century and before, but whilst they started as English, in every generation they married into the Irish aristocracy; so in at least one case the exploiters of the Irish were half or more Irish themselves.

And that is just one small corner of the world – it was happening just about everywhere.

Take another example – slavery. Everybody immediately thinks of the Atlantic slave trade, but those who look closer are in for a surprise – firstly that most slaves were made slaves by African slavemasters. And secondly the African slave trade had been going on uninterrupted since the Roman era – chiefly to the east.

At the same time the Atlantic slave trade was going on (16th-19th centuries), the Barbary pirates were also taking slaves – European slaves. It is estimated that 1-1.5 million were taken, although these figures are disputed, it is also the case that the Barbary slave raiding caused many small towns and villages to be deserted along the coastlines of Spain, Italy, and other places with a Mediterranean coastline.

And the early history of Europe is awash with slavery – Romans, Vikings, Angles, Saxons, and others, all participates in raiding for slaves – for local use, to Rome (in the early days), and to Byzantium (later on).

It is easy to look at one historical incident, and see the English exploiting the Irish, the Europeans exploiting Africans, etc. And there is an element of truth in that.

But it can also be seen not as the members of a nation exploiting the members of another nation, but as a type of person exploiting another type of person. The pure Marxist would claim it is the rich exploiting the poor, and there is an element of truth to that, but it is overly simplistic.

It is really more that the exploiter is the kind of person willing to do almost anything to enrich themselves including exploiting others. There isn’t anything wrong with getting rich or being rich as long as it is done honestly and reasonably.

There is a certain kind of person who does not care what level of suffering they cause to another person. For convenience let us call these people “sociopaths”.

In every example of exploitation in history, no matter what we label those responsible I am sure that the exploiters were sociopaths.

Now this is all very intellectually interesting, but perhaps the real question here is what should we do about the invisible sociopaths in today’s society? Because there are plenty – we might call them bankers, or slum landlords, or Russian oligarchs, or other things, but in the end what they all have in common is that they are sociopaths.

Giving The Sky The Finger

 

Fixing Wireshark’s Interpretation of RADIUS Operator_Name

 Computing, Working Notes  No Responses »
Mar 292018
 

For some reason when I look at RADIUS packet captures using Wireshark, the attribute Operator_Name is instead interpreted as Multi-Link-Flag (an integer rather than a string). I’m not sure what this is, but it is much more useful to me to be able to see the Operator_Name properly – and for example, filter on it.

It turns out this is easy to “fix” (if it is a fix) :-

  1. Find the file radius/dictionary.usr (mine was /usr/share/wireshark/radius/dictionary.usr)
  2. Edit that file, and comment out three lines containing “Multi-Link-Flag” which in my case appeared like :-
    1. ATTRIBUTE Multi-Link-Flag 126 integer
    2. VALUE Multi-Link-Flag True 1
    3. VALUE Multi-Link-Flag False 0
  3. Save the modified file.

After a restart, Wireshark now understands it.

It is possible that later versions of Wireshark have fixed this, or not – it is possible that the bug is down to whoever assigned RADIUS attribute codes!

Is Cambridge Analytica The Future?

 Computing, General, Security  No Responses »
Mar 252018
 

It seems likely that the company Cambridge Analytica paid Facebook for access to data and using it’s access, downloaded as much data as possible for nefarious purposes. Nobody should be that surprised at this.

Facebook does not host an enormously expensive social network just because it is fun; it does it to make money. It probably does this primarily through advertising, but selling access to social network data is always going to take place.

And from time to time, scandals when companies like Cambridge Analytica are going to take place. At which point Facebook will protest saying that it didn’t realise that the associated firm was doing such naughty things. And once the story drops out of the news, Facebook will carry on leaking data.

As the saying goes: “If you are not paying for it, you are the product.”

In the end, the only solution to something like this, is to produce some kind of peer-to-peer application that is as easy to use as Facebook, uses strong end-to-end encryption, and keeps our data private to those people and groups we choose to share it with.

The Hole

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