I run my own DNS so I’m not dependent on DNS from the ISP. I run my own email server so I’m not dependent on the ISP’s email server. And so forth. I depend on the ISP for nothing except the virtual hardware and the pipes to the Internet. Linode is pretty good about not f**king that up, will have to see how Digital Ocean works at that once I get a sample server deployed there.

Note that my needs are not Kryten’s needs. In particular, U.S. hosting of the company FTP server is needed due to export regulations (as is geolocation-based censoring of the FTP connection, sigh!), not to mention the fact that our government agency customers aren’t going to be interested in downloading updates off a foreign-based server (heh!). Err, yes. We’re one of those evil government contractors now. Their money is as green as anybody else’s and they need someone looking after their security camera networks too, so (shrug). Our service contract business seems to be booming with the government types, maybe because of the highly publicized cases where government bodies were sued when rapes etc. happened in an area supposedly under video surveillance and it turned out that the video camera wasn’t operating or the recorder wasn’t recording because nobody had a service contract to monitor them to make sure they were operating…

Reminds me of the Sunshine Bridge. Governor Jimmy Davis’s family owned a bunch of land alongside both side of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. His wife’s family also owned a lot of land in southern Bossier Parish. During his second term of office he built a bridge inbetween Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the Sunshine Bridge. This was literally a bridge to nowhere — there were no roads leading to it! Meanwhile, he built a road in South Bossier Parish that ended directly at the Red River, and plopped a bridge pylon right down in the middle of the river — but built no bridge! It turned out that the reason for both of these mystifying events was to enrich his family by having the state buy the right-of-way for the roads at a high price. The bridge was pretty much just an afterthought (as the Jimmie Davis Bridge in Shreveport proves — it was built several years after the road right-of-way was purchased and the road was built), and just there to justify buying Davis family land at an inflated price.

Like Bryan, I’m wondering if someone politically connected owned land on the flooding side of the creek .

Regarding memorabilia, I basically have three pieces of memorabilia — my grandmother’s well-thumbed Bible and Broadman Hymnal, and my grandfather’s 1948 Sears single-shot 20 gauge shot gun. I am the end of the line for my branch of the family, and somehow it seems silly to keep souvenirs when they’ll simply get thrown in the trash once I die by whoever cleans out whatever place I’m living in (probably an orderly for a nursing home since I have no family living nearby or capable of travel). So I gifted pretty much everything to other branches of the family ahead of time. They’re just things, anyhow.

Because of that, I haven’t cared much about hiding as I had done it for too many years. When I applied to the Peace Corp to go to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and got turned down by both governments, I figured that avenue was pretty much closed to me.

Now that I’m going back into a shell there is a lot of stuff to remember, and a few things to learn. I hitting potholes getting an inexpensive SSL cert because of the way my host works. I don’t have a permanent IPv4 for my sites, and that spooks people. I can get a permanent IPv6, but not everyone recognizes them yet.

I’ll figure it out eventually.

The problem my family faces is finding someone who has the space to store all of the accumulated stuff. There is a silver coffee service that has spent more time in transit, than in anyone’s home. I think my Mother has had it more than once, because I remember hauling it to UPS a couple of times. It is sort of a metal fruit cake that keeps getting ‘re-gifted’.

‘Enlightened self-interest’ is certainly a step up from the rampant greed that we have been seeing lately.

I used to run an underground BBS in the 80′s, and I learned a lot. (I called it Midnight BBS, mainly ’cause that’s when I turned my ’286 PC into my BBS server w/ 16 lines and V27 (4800 bps) modems. Pretty good for the day.) I did eventually get 2 dedicated servers w/ 32 lines (back then, you could request a 50-pair conduit be installed to the property which was the same price as a 2-pair, as they only installed 50-pair conduits anyway! Only had to pay for the lines when they were activated of course, but it saved a bundle on installation fees). I also had ‘Cactus BBS’.

One of the reasons I chose this VPS hoster in Italy (plus anyone who hosts in the USA/UK/AU now is crazy IMHO) , was part of the deal was a free SSL Cirt for life, that can be upgraded to an recognized eCommerce cirt for a reasonable fee when I’m ready. As badtux said above, it’s not hard to get your own free cirt or create your own (self-signed)

The SSL change requires coordination with my host, who has only recently made the option available, but it will happen at some point. Hopefully the change will be transparent.

TOR doesn’t has the scale needed for widespread use, and it is only as strong as the integrity of the people who are participating. It does provide an option, an option that shouldn’t have been needed.

That Onion Pi looks seriously interesting, I’m hoping to have some time to mess with the Pi in the near future, but life has been pretty busy.

Yeah… this placement was really stupid. It’s the 2nd time it’s flooded I was told today. It’s not far from here… My unit is about 20m from a railway line (which, being a country line only get’s a train ~2-4 hours. In fact, I’m so used to it that when I hear a train, I usually know what time it is. The station is about 100m away). On the other side of the line, is a creek that follows the line. Vic Rail, being intelligent when they built the line, built it on the high side of the creek since the land slopes away from here. Telstra, being the morons that they are, of course built on the low side. After the last flood, they *solved* the problem by adding a concrete drainage ditch between the exchange and the creek and adding a large square steel grid drainage into the storm water system. Obviously, they failed to understand what *FLOOD* means! It almost always overloads the storm water system, which actually increases the flooding! Morons. If they had built on this side, they would have had no problems (it’s really a head-scratcher given that this old exchange was built before Telstra was created during, what we refer to as *The Privatization Decade of Stupidity*, and it was still Gov owned, and so was the land on this side (being owned by Vic Rail which was State owned), and where they situated it was private land that had to be bought.

I just got an interesting eMailfrom SpeedMatters about the Lifeline debate I posted about before. Seems some Dem’s may have found some bit’s of backbone… Maybe. Of course, the Rethugs proving once again they care about no US citizen at all, want it completely shut down. And yet, morons there still vote for them. To quote an American idol (well, he was before he *came out*), Gomer Pyle: “Surprise, Surprise, Surprise!” (See… I follow the important happening in the USA!) A shame Jim Nabors had to wait 38 years to legally marry his partner. Ahh well… bit by tiny agonizing, resentful bit… the USA sloooooowly matures and begins to grow up, just a tad. Sadly though, usually just after the USA grows up a bit, they regress further than before. Crazy.

What role does the government play in ensuring every American has access to phone service?

This was the question up for debate last month as U.S. House of Representative members gathered to hear testimony on Lifeline. Lifeline is a crucial program that offers assistance to 8.6 million Americans who live at or below the poverty line and rely on programs like Medicaid or Food Stamps.

Republican members were quick to attack Lifeline, calling it an out-of-control “Obama phone” welfare program. In the face of this attack, Democrats, with support from labor, civil rights, and technology groups, used the facts to mount a strong defense.

Millions of Americans rely on Lifeline assistance — on average $9.25 per household per month — to stay connected to their jobs, their families, and to emergency services.

CWA endorses ranking member Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) defense of the program, when he said “without [Lifeline's] assistance, these families would not be able to call for help in emergencies or participate fully in our economy.” What’s more, there’s a new bill in Congress, co-sponsored by Representatives Waxman, Doris Matsui, Anna Eshoo, and four other Democrats that would expand the Lifeline subsidies to be used for the adoption of broadband across the country.

As Rep. Matsui points out, “In today’s digital economy, if you don’t have access to the Internet, you are simply at a competitive disadvantage.” Programs like Lifeline are essential to a thriving America, and attacks against them should be met forcefully.

Speed Matters (CWA) have some other interesting items you may be interested in.

Speed Matters
“President calls for more wireless spectrum”
“As they have for almost 20 years, cable prices rose much faster than inflation.”
“U.S. tablet ownership doubles to 33 percent”
“Obama: Let there be broadband”

Nice to see a Union actually truing to make things better (even if it is self-interest at work. There is nothing wrong with *Enlightened* self-interest. It’s better than the GOP version which is “Me an me mates are all OK. You all can go drop dead!”

Anyway, my Maternal Grandfather, who was a staunch Unionist (or, as my Grandmother referred to him “A professional trouble-maker”), he was a Shop Steward for three large Unions after WW2, would be quite proud! I have his ticket’s and log books. Nice bit of history to have. I even have a WW2 Ration Book of his that still has about half the ration tickets in it. I’ve been offered a pretty penny (as he would say) for it… But I could never sell it (or any of the other memorabilia, such as their Birth/Death Cirt’s, Marriage License, His military papers and awards etc! Even if I had to live on the street. Well.. I might consider an 8 digit figure (otherwise my Grandfather would rise from the dead to haunt me mercilessly and continually ask me if I was totally insane!) Everyone has a price, mine is quite a high one (in this case I mean of course). Heh…

Hipparchia, the only change would be to make HTTPS the norm for the site, instead of HTTP. It shouldn’t have much effect on anything else, other than a minor time loss for the encrypt/decrypt process.

I appreciated it, Steve. When you do stuff alone, you often miss the obvious errors, like forgetting the “n’t” that should have been suffixed to to verbs in some places.

I can understand your use, and you weren’t there for the end, so that’s a matter of bad luck for the mouse. If they are chewing up your garden, you have to do something. I would probably try a terrier, but most of what you can get today have lost the keen sense of the type of hunting they were bred for, so they end up being being a bigger mess than the vermin. A friend has one, and the dog thinks mice are amusing, not something he is supposed to catch. Cats aren’t usually much good against raccoons and possums, and they would probably be taken by the hawks.

I would probably try a motion sensing sprinkler head or an electric fence to protect the garden. The problem with fences is that they often make it hard to work on the garden.

Good luck.

PGP certainly has its uses but defeating traffic analysis isn’t one of them and the average Joe Schmuck hasn’t a chance of decrypting that PGP-encrypted email that you sent him. I have a test, I call it the Mom Test. Could my Mom do it? If not, then it’s not viable as a solution. Dilbert’s Mom maybe could do it, but my Mom isn’t Dilbert’s Mom, my Mom is the typical computer user that never really wanted to know anything about computers and uses it only because it’s the easiest way to keep up with her far-flung clan (and get recipes off the Internets, of course!).

Here is an interesting use of your new Raspberry Pi computer… Onion Pi, a Tor-routing wifi router based on Raspberry Pi. Onionlicious. Unfortunately while I use Tor occasionally to look at things that I know would put me on the radar of certain TLA’s, it’s really too slow for much of the web browsing that I do, and some of it — like YouTube — can’t go through Tor anyhow. So it goes.