E 1 iunie şi măseaua de minte mă nenoroceşte

M-a pălit o inflamaţie serioasă a gingiei chiar sîmbătă, nu putea sub nici o formă să fie şi ea în timpul săptămînii să mă duc şi eu la doctor. Cred că e blestem de 1 iunie, nenorocita de măsea de minte care apare imediat ce nu mai eşti copil (după standardele sociale) vine acuma şi-mi strică ziua. Şi cu ocazia asta mi-a apărut şi un ganglion. Am fost la farmacie şi mi-au dat Ketonal şi Strepsils, din cîte am citit pe prospect un fel de anestezice, unu dintre ele conţinînd şi ceva cu “profen” în coada numelui, şi eu doar fug de medicamente ca dracu de tămîie, mai ales din astea calmante. Şi mi-au luat bani bine.

În altă ordine de idei e deja a treia problemă medicală de anul ăsta, şi pînă la 100 de ani mai e mult. Medicul de familie mă enervează la culme, data trecută a trebuit să mă închin la ea să mă trimită la analize şi să se descopere că chiar eram bolnav. Deci cine e din Timişoara poate să-mi lase o recomandare cu un medic de familie mai atent şi mai puţin plin de sine (am o recomandare deja, dar dacă e de unde alege e mai bine).

(Citind pe wikipedia bag de seamă că aveam o concepţie greşită, nu scrie nicăieri clar că profenurile astea ar fi narcotice.)

“Vote for Bug” and “Privacy Concerns Two (as in ACTA)”

1. Please go to the KDE bugs page and vote for one of the most stupid bugs the Linux desktop has: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149676
It seems to me that having this written here is the most polite way of people get interested with this bug (as long as I am not able to provide a solution myself), as other means had no effect.

2. The most outrageous idea ever is brought to our attention by LWN. Customs police should have the right (and obligation ?) to search through a traveller’s electronic documents to see if he carries pirated multimedia. This shit seemed has a name: ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), and a wikipedia page : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement . Of the fears:
-for one right (copyright) you negate many others. The most important. Why should someone look through my files.
-makes for spying.
-looks like 1984 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four) is coming to us very fast.

Too good that we don’t have yet technologies to guess what’s in ones mind (with our current understanding it looks imposible to copy a man’s mind without touching it somehow by mechanisms of the observer’s effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenberg_uncertainty_principle).

Aside the important stories:
The second part of my message has changes to make it to a new article, as it goes very well my last post. By the way, since then: I bought a USB flash; I changed the server through which I send my e-mails, it’s google no more; and from time to time I use the Yahoo search engine.

Of course, at this moment Yahoo looks very good to me, as managers had the guts to refuse Microsoft, altough may not bring the most of profit to the shareholders. It’s refreshing to see that you can hold a business for other reasons than making maximum profits (though it may not be the case for Yahoo). I hope to see times when Romanian companies will try to solve other problems than having the maximum of profit.

Continuation of the first “Privacy concerns” article http://alecs1.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/my-privacy-concerns/.

My privacy concerns

A few days ago I received the same spam message in my both Gmail inboxes (they have very different names), at a distance of a few seconds. I asked then some people if they have received the same message, and they didn’t. I was hoping that if the message has been sent to tens of milions of addresses, changes are it gets to both my inboxes too. But no, no one else got that message.

Fabricating, one conclusion could be that both my gmail addresses have got into some spammer’s list through some more in depth analysis, based on web behavior, that would classify the humans behind an address. Of course, a human analyst could make a lot of connections between the two addresses, as one of them is frequently used for bug reporting on the Debian lists, while the other may have been used by mistake when sending some automated crash reports.

Now, the biggest target of my web related concerns is Google. How much could Google automatedly find out about me? Let’s start with a few examples:

• Google can know when I start my computer (and to an extend when I wake up ), as when my computer dehibernates the IM program and the mail client will connect to Google. Also it can know when I go to sleep.

• Google can read 99% of my e-mails, as I encrypt very few of them.

• Google can, of course, make a connection between my two accounts.

• Google can draw even more connections between e-mail addresses, as when I am at foreign computers I use to send myself links to study in detail at home. I also use to send myself the school homeworks, and open them at some computer at school. (this will happen no more, as will put an end to my scotch stinginess and buy and flash drive tomorrow ).

• Of course, after drawing those connections, Google could guess where I study and where I work, at least.

• The biggest one is that I gave my full, correct, details (addresses, phone number, a link to my CV etc) to Google, in order to apply for Summer of Code.

• If I login to the web interface of my gmail account all other google services will personalized for me (blogger navigating, search), this happened a few times. This means that it is as simple as it gets for Google to make draw a relation between that account and my searched (of course, that is also possible with the IP address, though harder, as I am behind a router with more computers).

• After killing a Firefox session at school and starting Firefox again after 2 weeks on the same computer with my account, I was automatically logged in (this is more security than privacy, but anyway).

Since all of the stuff I wrote before is more of an exercise, things may not be as bad. Let’s continue the pseudo-paranoia exercise anyway. What’s to do about this? Well, I don’t how much that matters, but I start with:

• deleting those damn cookies once in a while.

• use more diverse search engines. Monoculture and inbreeding leads to disasters.

• having the mail program check my e-mail at long intervals (3 hours now). This is also good for security, as the password is sent less often, and also generally as you are less disturbed by noise.

• logging on IM less often. This is less of an option, as I have many acquaintances that use gtalk and ymess (and that gtalk thing it’s friggin xmpp that has been existing for years, but no one uses it if it doesn’t have the Google/Yahoo/MS trademark). I will just do it.

• carrying a usb drive with me.

• learning about all those geeky thinks like tor, maybe privoxy.

• use different servers for sending my e-mail.

• not having this blog on blogspot .

This article will probably be updated as I find out more things to be concerned for, or as people tell me that some sections of the article are pure shit. And of course, if I learn how to format this, and also be a bit coherent.

Prezentare Ubuntu la UVT, sâmbătă, 17 mai

Am primit anunţul ăsta pe mail. Va fi prezentat Hardy Heron, ultima versiune a Ubuntu. Nu e distribuţia pe care o folosesc dar salut implicarea şi invit lumea să vină. Prezentarea va avea loc la UVT, locul unde învăţ şi eu şi sper să termin anul ăsta.

Textul anunţului, aşa cum a sosit pe mail (fără diacritice adică ):

Salut,

Sambata 17 mai 2008, ora 11 in amfiteatrul A11 din cadrul Universitatii
de Vest din Timisoara, cu sprijinul Facultatilor de Fizica si
Matematica-Informatica, se va organiza prezentarea distributiei Ubuntu
8.04 ‘Hardy Heron’.

Intrarea este libera.

Participantii pot solicita un CD gratuit cu Ubuntu, fiind rugati sa
confirme participarea la adresa:

http://www.ubuntu.ro/inregistrare/