Year of the Linux Desktop – 2026

Posted on December 21, 2021 by DocDock

It seems like only yesterday (2003) that a large government entity, the city of Munich, announced it would be converting their cities personal computers over to their own edition of Linux called LiMux. The good news was that perhaps 80% of the desktops would be converted over by 2008.

Not sure if it should be a surprise or not but the rollout of Linux to a city full of civil servants who were perfectly happy using Windows didn’t go quite as planned. Instead of all 18000 workstations only 1800 were converted over by 2009, but the rollout was completed to 15000 of the desktops by 2013. The sky didn’t fall nor did I hear how Munich sunk into the earth so I guess it was a successful rollout.

It may or may not be a surprise that a politician might change their mind on any given topic and the conversion over to Linux was such a topic. We may never really know all of the drama going on behind the scenes nor will we know if Microsoft moving their German headquarters to Munich played a roll.

The summary is that Munich tried to create their own Linux distribution and despite what was general acceptance, see wikipedia, they switched back to Windows 10 by 2020.

Open source 2026

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is planning on replacing proprietary software with open source software. Specifically they want to replace Microsoft office with LibreOffice and later to replace Windows with Linux.

This actually might be a reasonably good plan, start with the applications which is something the users are passionate about and eventually change the underlying operation system that they are not as invested in.

We will keep an eye on this particular German state to see if this plan succeeds.

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Hacking skills as determined by a politician

Posted on December 7, 2021 by DocDock

Words have meaning and it is a bit disturbing when you read an article or see a speech where they are being incorrectly used. The most recent example of this is how people use or refer to technology. When computers were new, well newish, a hacker was someone who was an advanced computer technology enthusiast. These “hackers” played with and pushed the limits of the technology that was available to them.

Over the years the term hacker has taken on a different tone until today. Today this is someone who is still advanced with computer technologies but uses their skills to gain access to data or systems that they do not have authorization to use.

I know a lot of smart computer types but none of them are really hackers using either definition of the word hacker. I was surprised to read how Mike Parson, the Governor of Missouri, was able to recognize a hacker without any real examination.

The background is that a reporter was visiting one of the states web pages and he managed to uncover a security problem. The problem was that the web site which allowed the public to search teacher certifications and credentials and the site was written in such a way that it also held the social security numbers of those teachers. This information was apparently not visible unless you looked at the source code.

Finding this information might be a leap too far for most people but web browsers take this HTML code and display the site in your browser but the browser can also display the actual source code. It was the actual source code that contained this highly sensitive information. This discovery was made by St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist. Once the journalist realized the seriousness of the problem it was reported back to the organization so the problem could be corrected before reporting on this issue in the newspaper. This is exactly how responsible security testing firms treat these same types of issues. Thus no information was in danger because of the article as the problem was corrected before it was published.

This is certainly embarrassing to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education which was maintaining this website. Yet, it was perhaps more embarrassing to Governor Mike Parson as the buck really does stop at the top. It seems Governor Mike allegedly feels that the Post-Dispatch reporter is a hacker and is recommending prosecution. I guess that to Governor Mike thinks the ability to press a key sequence on your web browser to view the page source code makes you a hacker. Yup utilizing a built in developer feature is apparently the new bar for determining hacker skills.

Not only that, apparently the new reward in Missouri for reporting security short comings in their infrastructure is threats of prosecution by their governor.

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More privacy or just annoying control

Posted on November 17, 2021 by DocDock

There are a lot of things you should be doing. Eat right, exercise and get enough sleep. These are some of the important things we should be doing as humans but there is quite a few things we should be doing with and for our computers.

  • backup our data
  • keep security patches up to date
  • be nice to your IT people

Unfortunately, we don’t always do these things but I decided to get my IT back under control and so I decided to start with the router. A new router, heck even the previous generation router has a lot of technology support beyond what you might expect – NAS, Television Streaming support, VPN and more.

I decided to work on the more mundane tasks such as ensuring that every device in the network had a name and that old devices were disabled. Ideally the next step will be to refuse any devices whose MAC address is not known.

Imagine my surprise to see my wife “owned” at least six identical iphones. That is simply not possible so I locked each of them down that did not have a MAC address equal with her actual phone. Unfortunately this was every single phone and yes, my wife was not impressed she had been locked out of the network. I could see that one of the phones actually was connected about a minute ago, the MAC did not match but I enabled it anyway. Believe it or not, that worked. The MAC address is a unique identifier that is burned into into the network card. How can this be?

This constant value is what helps make the entire system work. The router will typically assign the same IP address to the same MAC each time it expires. Apple did realize this could actually provide a unique identifier that the network operators could use to track you. They actually modified iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and watchOS 7 so your devices don’t actually give their actual MAC when trying to join a network.

If you delete the iPhone entry from your network list and rejoin you will probably get a different IP address because the router got a different MAC address.

It really isn’t a big deal now that I know about this change from Apple but in this case knowing IT makes it harder to work with your new Apple iPhone not easier.

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A prelude to 1984

Posted on October 29, 2021 by DocDock

The book 1984 by George Orwell is about Winston Smith who works for a repressive regime that rewrites history to fit their current narrative.

It has actually quite a few years since I read this book but you might think with all that is going on in the world it is a rough draft for a new book. We don’t have a repressive regime at the moment but there is quite a few of the elements that could be important for such situation.

We definitely have the Stalinesque ability to track people. Oddly enough rather than having televisions that track us, well, we have some of that as well but most adults do carry around a device that can be used to track the person carrying it within a few feet. We also use computers in such a way that allows a number of different companies to know a lot about us including very personal information. The people tell search engines and ISP’s information about themselves and what they are interested in.

The US government does surveillance of their own citizens in quite a few different ways. One of which is to track the communications of its citizens. So much data has been looked at this is “this isn’t a wiretap, it’s a country-tap.”. Knowing who is calling who, along with the frequency, can help to get a picture of who your “circle of friends” are. To be honest, if you looked through my phone bill for a few months you would have a good idea who I call, if there is a pattern and perhaps by looking at the names you would know if they are family.

If you don’t make many phone calls this is a pretty easy way to see who you are really connected to but with all of the new technology some of these calls are starting to fall off the radar. It is possible to call your digital contacts using apps such as WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook messager, Skype and many others. Some of these other apps actually make it harder for wiretaps whether they are with or without a warrant.

How can we fill in this lost information? The government could start to find your circle of friends a bit more directly by looking at the various social media groups you participate in.. Yet, how can you know if John Smith is a Facebook member and what his username is? Perhaps you can have your law enforcement gather which companies you frequent – nah that would be over the top.

LAPD officers told to collect social media data on every civilian they stop

Nope, I guess the Los Angeles Police force has been doing just this and this is including individuals who are not arrested or accused of a crime.

This would give a lot of direct information, again, the people being surveilled would be keeping all of their relationships current.

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The fall from grace

Posted on October 12, 2021 by DocDock

It is actually quite easy to label a group as the “enemy” if you have never spent any time with them. Governments in foreign lands are the perfect faceless enemy that provides the focal point for criticism or even hate. Different societies place different emphasis on different values from free speech, societal harmony, or even a patriarchal form of government. It is hard to judge a different culture from afar but it is easy to to make a list of differences.

Corruption in government

How can you truly measure the corruption? Only connected people tend to make it to government office and once they do their overall wealth, after a few short years, easily outstrips the average wealth of their constituents.

Minority rule

Through what seems to be some form of legal trickery the government is controlled not by the what the majority of the citizen. This also takes place in conjunction with legal maneuvers to disenfranchise various groups of voters.

Controlling their citizens

I guess dress code is all a matter of opinion. As a much younger person seeing the girls in their skimpy swim suits or ultra short skirts seemed ok but as the dad this much less appreciated. Just like I can control what my children wear some governments seem to have a lot of control of what their women and children wear outside of the house. Women are actualy limited in things that they can do with a male family member or even alone. One of the clearest indication of this women’s ability to get an abortion.

Legalized stealing by the government

Nobody expected to get held up by the police at a traffic stop. It is a sign of corruption if you do not know if the money in your pocket will be taken by the police with out knowing if you will ever get it back.

Living in primitive conditions

Everyone would recognize that living in a cave with nothing more than a rock for a pillow would be living in the stone age but it is rarely that clear cut. What if you live in an apartment building with no heating or air conditioning. A sign of true poverty is if we cannot expect reliability in some of the most basic human needs – water and electricity. Another sign of living in primitive conditions might be if your buildings and bridges collapse without being bombed by a foreign power.

Disbelief of science

Science can be very inconvenient when someone throws in your face to prove their point. It can be especially upsetting if someone uses science to increase your cost of doing business – especially if this something you don’t really believe in. This is difficult if your own government doesn’t support or in fact threatens your livelihood if you don’t toe the party line. This is even worse if science becomes politicized to the point facts no longer matter.

Civil strife

When 50% or more of the country can’t tolerate their fellow citizens.

This entire laundry list of issue could easily be pointed at a lot of different “third world” countries. They might sound like one or two specific countries but unfortunately they are all about one country in particular – the United States of America.

It is ok for the various political parties to disagree with what they see as the priorities for the country as a whole but at the moment it seems that both parties, perhaps one more than the other, is focusing on its own groups best interests not the best interests of the entire country.

Are these current troubles going to be a relatively short blip like the McCarthy years or will it last decades like the cold war. At the end of the day, it is important for everyone to behave as if they all belong to a single country and work for the betterment of that country.

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Fun with electronics

Posted on September 29, 2021 by DocDock

If you would like to learn more about Linux, programming, networking or just playing around with leds you can purchase a number of books or online courses – the internet is full of them. I created a book to get my children interested in using computers for more than just games.

Getting started with Arduino and Raspberry pi

You can learn more about it here. Consider purchasing it to support the channel.

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Think of the children

Posted on September 22, 2021 by DocDock

I actually was a child once and have children of my own so I can understand wanting to protect some of society’s most vulnerable people. A topic such as child porn is probably the worst possible thing that could occur.

Thus supporting the fight to prevent bad things from occurring is a truly noble and Apple has stepped up to fight this problem. Unlike arguments of creating more or bigger safety nets for society there are two possible outcomes and both can be correct depending on your position. This is not true for child porn and sexual predators there is no positive argument thus this issue tends to be used to implement new rules, regulations or restrictions.

Yet, in order to support this very admirable goal Apple has decided its users have to give up an element of our privacy. The plan is photos from our iPhones will be scanned for known child pornography prior to be uploaded to the Apple cloud. In addition to this the iMessage service will be also be scanning for text and photos that are not suitable for minors.

I do not want anyone to use modern technology and social media to inappropriately reach my children but lets look at Apple’s change from another view.

Apple will have a world wide infrastructure to monitoring photos and text that should not be shared. The authorities will be informed if this occurs “too many times”.

If we look at this change on its face value this is a great way to scoop up a few of the technological naive people who think technology is a magic cloak. The problem is that this international companies are responsible to answering to many different governments some of which have differing ideas on privacy or what is acceptable. This means that dictators or authoritarian regimes can replace “child pornography” with memes and track anyone who sends anti-government texts. Too many times could be equal to 1.

The same reason why adding a government only back door to an encryption method will never be secure over the long run. Someone will discover it, break it or leak the secret password. The same is true about implementing this infrastructure, it will take the Apple corporation from one that tries to support privacy to “the authoritarians” favorite foreign cell phone maker.

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A trojan horse

Posted on August 29, 2021 by DocDock

Gaming and office productivity tasks which pretty much describes all of the things you can do on a computer. If you want or need to do either of these then Windows 10 is a great operating system to have. There are virtually no A level games that are not available on Windows.

If this is indeed true why would anyone want to move away from Windows 10. Sure there might be some small reasons but if you need to purchase software you would not be excited you might need to purchase all new software.

We could all move away from Windows 10 because the newest and bestest Windows 11 is about to be released. Sure, we might have to purchase new software in some cases but we are going to get some really good functionality right? Well, lets look at all the Windows 10 goodness we received when it was the new kid on the block.

  • Start Menu Ads in Windows 10
  • Windows 10 targeted ads
  • Windows 10 Location Tracking and Location History
  • News app notifications
  • Windows store
  • Cortana searches only with Bing not Google
  • Forced updates

These are definitely not positive features in a lot of peoples opinions although they are quite interesting for Microsoft. What does Windows 11 bring to the table?

  • TPM 2.0
  • UEFI, Secure Boot capable

Windows does have a few new requirements which can actually be used to help keep your computer secure. Yet, the history of UEFI and Windows has not only been one of security against installing unsigned software. Microsoft is a large company and can afford infrastructure for dealing with UEFI signed keys and motherboard manufacturers but this one situation can cause difficulties. The Linux world did come up with a solution but if you wanted to start completely from scratch you wouldn’t be able to install new keys onto your own hardware.

Another issue is the requirement of TPM 2.0 support on your computer. Although TPM 2.0 has been around since 2014 is has been implemented by a lot of manufacturers as a hardware addon. According to some of the rumors you also need a CPU that is two years old or older. This change might all be for the best but it sounds like the new hardware requirements might mean new hardware is necessary.

Well, I am sure that Microsoft has no plans on getting everyone to switch to Windows 11 and then either lock them into their own ecosystem and force everyone to purchase from their own software store. They would have no plans to consolidating every Windows pc into locked down platform.

Oh, if you have Windows 10 you can get Windows 11 for free! Wow, hundreds of engineers working on a successor to Windows 10 for years and Microsoft wants to give it to all of us for free?!?

Lets all hope this isn’t some sort of Trojan Horse.

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Mature minor doctrine – think of the children

Posted on August 10, 2021 by DocDock

Mature Minor Doctrine – think of the children

I was young once and despite my bluster here, I was not all that rebellious against my parents. Either that or the could see me coming a mile away and defused the situation. In terms of serious issues I could have done any of the following.

Color my hair
get a mohawk haircut
get some piercings
get a small tattoo
get a large obvious tattoo
run away and join the circus

Now, a few years later, I can only imagine that these are still options but there are a few very polarizing issues in the United States at the moment. What political party do you support and do you believe in getting a Covid 19 vaccination.

I cannot imagine all that many 14 or 15 year olds who start dressing up like either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or having a demonstration in the living-room but what about the vaccine? If your parents are against it you can really rile them up by getting it.

Normally, it is your parents that bring you to the doctor and get those kinds of things done. Yet, kids these days are pretty tech savvy, and there is a lot of information available on the internet. Actually some of this information is describing this “Mature Minor Doctrine” which has been online since 2008. This Tennessee law was passed in 1987 when kids were less rebellious and it allowed minors to get vaccinated above the age of 14 without their parents consent.

All of this might interesting but not especially relevant for those who do not live in Tennessee. Well, except that the Tennessee health department has backed down from their efforts to get minors vaccinated. These efforts were in the form of Facebook and Twitter posts. They have gone as far as to delete these posts and to fire the medical director, Mischelle Fiscus, for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs.

I guess it may have had something to do with the Tennessee state senator Janice Bowling who urged the head of the health department, Lisa Piercey, to “take action” and to “remove the fear, the concerns and the anger that has gone across the state as a result of (Fiscus) letter”.

“It is very disconcerting to see the letter, or memo, from Dr. Fiscus stating that Tennessee law allows the Department of Health to give vaccinations to children 14 years of age,” “Tennessee law does not allow that” Janice Bowling

I guess the senator who is not as familiar with the Tennessee state statutes is concerned about the flood of rebellious youths who have or are planning to get the vaccine. Thjs is obvious by the massive number of teens, which as of June 2021 could be measured to 8000 eight individuals which included the three children of Lisa Piercey.

I guess now that we have managed to protect the hords of rebellious youths wanting to get a vaccination in the middle of a Pandemic the Tennessee department of health can focus on other pressing issues such as enforcing the prohibition of teaching anything that is related to “non-abstinent-behavior” and collection those 500 dollar fines.

Fines for teaching anything non-abstinent as protection
https://siecus.org/state_profile/tennessee-state-profile/

More on this topic is available from “The Tennessean”
https://eu.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/07/12/tennessee-fires-top-vaccine-official-covid-19-shows-new-spread/7928699002/

https://eu.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/07/15/tennessee-top-vaccine-official-got-glowing-reviews-before-being-fired/7980386002/

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Clear as glass

Posted on July 28, 2021 by DocDock

I don’t always have the most current electronics. It can be a bit of a bummer to see kids on the bus whose cell phone is about 20x nicer than mine. However, my old phone was in a bad way so I thought I would get a new one.

Not wanting my screen to look like a shattered mirror, I also bought some protection. Wow, you would think that my last phone was from the last century the differences are so large. But, working with computers I expect things to get a lot better every 2-3 years. What did surprise me was the new phone “protective screen”.

The old technology was essentially a very wide piece of clear tape. The likelihood of getting air bubbles under the tape is not 100% but that was my experience. I used up a few packages to protective films only to see one or two little air bubbles in the middle of the screen. Fast forward about 6 or so years and we are protecting our glass screens with glass covers. It seems a bit counter intuitive but that is supposed to protect my phone if I drop it.

I am not going to test that theory, well, not intentionally. But the installation of the security glass is amazing. If you did a good enough job cleaning the screen you essentially drop the glass on and it sticks like magic with no bubbles. With a bit of help from a friend, we essentially drop the glass and you could see the air slide out to the edges. The preparation took all the time and the glass was installed in about 30 seconds.

It is so cool that I almost can’t wait for my next phone.

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