Max Mosley Is Innocent

 Politics  No Responses »
Jul 242008
 

Or something like that.

To be more precise he has won his case against the “News of the World” for invasion of privacy.

The interesting thing about this decision despite the fact that it is not a landmark decision (previous court cases claiming invasion of privacy have been won in the UK), is that the complaints of journalists about it. They claim that the defacto “privacy law” that this is pointing to will undermine serious investigative journalism.

It may do.

But the media industry has long known that the actions of the muckrakers and pornographers of the gutter press is hugely unpopular with the thinking public. They have long had means of controlling themselves through an industry body, and have failed to control the seamier side of so-called journalism. State control of news media is abhorrent, but a lack of effective self-regulation will lead to that.

Of course the public has to take some of the blame here too. We need to stop buying newspapers whose principle content involves unwarranted invasions of privacy. Whilst many (including myself) don’t think much of Max Mosley’s actions in his private life, it should remain his personal business unless he is up to something that is illegal or has a significant impact on his public work.

Boycott the gutter press!

iPhone: Changing The Root Password

 Computing  1 Response »
Jul 192008
 

I have just changed the root password on my iPhone from the default (really dumb of Apple to give every iPhone the same root password; it would not be much work to set the default root password from the IMEI or something). Before doing so I googled for appropriate instructions.

Nothing wrong with the technical side of the instructions out there, but none I read made a point of what I would consider basic safety for dealing with changing the root password on a Unix machine. Keep a session open in case things go wrong!

My own instructions for doing the change went along the lines of :-

  1. Open two terminals
  2. Create a new password hash with openssl passwd -crypt -salt "XX" "xyzzy" (obviously change the salt (“XX”) to two characters of your choice, and pick a better password than “xyzzy”!). Keep the output stashed somewhere safe.
  3. In both terminals ssh to the iPhone (ssh root@iphone).
  4. Copy the file /etc/master.passwd to a safe copy /etc/master.passwd.original
  5. Edit /etc/master.passwd and put the stashed has into the second field of root’s entry.
  6. Now exit from the ssh session in one window and try to reconnect with the new password.

If things have gone wrong you will have an open session available to fix things (cp /etc/master.passwd.original /etc/master.passwd would be worth trying) whereas without you are kind of stuck.

The River Avon – Where The Name Comes From

 History, Humour  No Responses »
Jun 222008
 

I’ve always been interested in the origins of landscape words … Rithe, Bourne, etc. In Britain, there are a fair number of rivers called the “Avon” and I used to idly spend some time wondering where that name came from. The origins are quite amusing for someone like me.

It so happens that the Welsh word for river is “Afon” and I used to wonder if the similarity to “Avon” was due to some sort of miscommunication between the native Brythonic population and incoming Saxons. It turns out that I was not the only one to think so.

So all the rivers called Avon are really named “River River”. One can imaging how this might occur :-

Saxon: “So, native what is this river called ?” (in Old English)

Native: “It’s a river you dumb Saxon ox” (in proto-Welsh)

Saxon: “Avon? That’s a funny name, but I guess I can remember it” (OE)

Native: “Yes, a river with water in it”

Of course the real reason may have been that the Brythonic population didn’t want to give too much information away that would help the Saxons militarily. And of course the misunderstanding (or misleading answers) means we have lost the original names for the rivers in question.

The Death Sentence

 Politics  1 Response »
Apr 272008
 

I have been reading a book that has renewed my interest in the use of the death sentence in various countries in the world. Not a great book by any stretch of the imagination, but I have been thinking about the use of the death sentence for many years.

After all I live in a country that refuses to use the death sentence and has for many years. Despite the fact that re-introducing the death sentence would be quite popular with the general population. Politicians have taken a moral stand that the death sentence is wrong no matter how popular it may be. Seeing politicians take a moral stand is something that by itself is quite unusual and something to be encouraged.

There are many good reasons why the death sentence can be thought of as wrong; there are even a few good reasons why the death sentence can be though of as fully justified. This post is about just one overpowering reason why it is wrong to impose the death sentence.

If it can be wrong for one man (or woman) to kill another on their own, why is any less wrong for a gang of people to kill another ? It may be argued that the state is not just some gang, but it is still a collection of men and women acting on behalf of a society. Each one of those individuals is prohibited from killing, but as a whole they are not ?

If it is wrong for an individual to kill another individual, then it is wrong for the state to kill any individual

IT: Upgrading To Ubuntu 8.04

 Computing  No Responses »
Apr 272008
 

This entry is about upgrading a machine running Ubuntu 7.10 to Ubuntu 8.04 which is only just out. But not in the standard way which would be quite boring.

I have at least two computers running Ubuntu, both configured in a fairly complex way and both fairly important (in the sense I really don’t need to try an upgrade and end up with a broken system). Whilst Ubuntu frequently does upgrade without a hitch, it can occasionally choke; this is seemingly more common with more complex installations.

Why not preserve an old copy of the install around to revert to ? Well with LVM it is perfectly possible. Ignoring what happens underneath, I have an LVM volume group called “internal” (actually I don’t, but I would if I were to re-install) which has :-

  • var – 4Gbytes to be mounted as /var
  • root – 8Gbytes to be mounted as /
  • home – “enough” to be mounted as /home

Note I do not believe in allocating all available disk space with a storage management system like LVM available; I do a great deal of storage management work and the biggest mistake anyone can make is assuming that they know the storage requirements of a system throughout it’s whole lifetime. This applies in spades to a desktop machine. Without some free space, the suggested upgrade mechanism won’t work.

Now with modern hard disks, we are likely to have more than enough storage to allocate. For instance on this machine right away I have 138Gbytes of free storage (mirrored). And that it is on a two year old machine; a newer machine would have larger disks. Easily enough storage to have two or more “copies” of different versions of Ubuntu around.

It would be nice if Ubuntu could do much of the work for us, but for now it’s pretty much a manual process. As an aside, the Ubuntu developers should probably think about using LVM in the default installer to assist in the development of this kind of feature.

The first stage is to create new logical volumes and build filesystems on them. I chose to name the logical volumes after the operating system version they would be running …

lvcreate -n 804root --size=8G /dev/internal
lvcreate -n 804var --size=4G /dev/internal
mkfs -t xfs /dev/internal/804root
mkfs -t xfs /dev/internal/804var

Now the key here is not to look at the current size of your /var filesystem and decide you need a much smaller filesystem … or the upgrade process will refuse to start. You can always reduce it later if you really want to quibble over 1-2Gbytes.

The next stage is to copy the relevant filesystems across. At this point you should avoid running as much as possible and probably do this from a text terminal after shutting down GDM …

/etc/init.d/gdm stop
apt-get install star
     (If you don't have it installed already)
mount /dev/internal/804var /mnt
star -v -xdev -acl -copy /var/* /mnt
umount /mnt
mount /dev/internal/804root /mnt
star -v -xdev -acl -copy / /mnt

This stage will take some time to complete. You will want to do a quick check of the new / and /var to ensure they look roughly like the originals (I always seem to come up with the equivalent of /var/var when I do something like this). Notice that the new root filesystem is still mounted … you need to edit /mnt/etc/fstab to alter what devices are mounted for / and /var.

The next stage is a bit tricky because I didn’t do it “right”, so I will be suggesting something that I didn’t try myself. The task is to modify /boot/grub/menu.lst in such a way as to result in two separate menu entries that will boot either the old operating environment or the new operating environment.

I would suggest that you :-

  1. Create an entry outside of the “DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST” that essentially replicates one of the entries. It should not be modified to boot off the new root filesystem.
  2. Modify all of the entries in the “DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST” (it makes sense when you review the menu.lst file) to alter the “root=’ kernel parameter to point to the new root filesystem. This is not the “root (hd0,0)” part, but the kernel parameter “root”. It will specify the old root filesystem logical volume (something like “root=/dev/internal/root”) and you want to change this to “root=/dev/internal/804root”.

At this point you should probably reboot to check that both environments work. Just make sure you have a recent rescue CD knocking around before you do.

After you have done the checking you can boot the new environment and use ‘update-manager’ to upgrade the new environment to Ubuntu 8.04. This will probably work (it worked fine for me).

Undoubtedly the next time I try this, I will figure out how to make it work better, but it is good enough to have a “fallback” option in case an upgrade goes badly. For instance until last week, running Vmware Server under 8.04beta was pretty tricky and if it were still the case I would have to revert back to 7.10.

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