Domains Seized by Department of Homeland Security

Today the internet has been raging over the American government’s recent seizure of a number of domains containing possible copyright infringing content and counterfeit goods. Now, I’m not arguing that selling counterfeit goods should be allowed. The recent seizure however, where neither the claimed offenders, nor their domain registrars have been notified, represents a way of conducting law enforcement that just doesn’t belong in a modern society. The seizure have been done through ICANN, the organization responsible for maintaining top-level domains and root DNS servers.

Security and Privacy series pt. 1 - Securing your communications with OpenPGP

For the first part of my series on data security, I want to talk about the use of public key cryptography as a way to encrypt your communications, prove that you’re the original author and ensure that communications you receive really originate from who they claim to. Cory Doctorow did a great job of describing how public key encryption works in his book “Little Brother”, so I won’t reinvent the wheel, but instead give you his words:

An introduction series to data privacy and security

The last year or so I have to a large degree migrated most of my data over to external hosting such as Google Mail, Calendar, Wave, Contacts and Docs. My day to day work items go in a Dropbox folder allowing easy synchronization, backup and basic revision control. Some of my programming projects are hosted on Github and Bitbucket, and my website is hosted at Dreamhost. All these services have given me a workflow in my day to day life that is wonderful.

Installing Ubuntu on the HP MediaSmart EX490

I recently bought a HP MediaSmart EX490 for use as a home backup- and media server. In my eagerness to getting a new plaything however - I only looked at the pros: Great form factor for a home server staying in the living room Room for 4 front-swappable hard drives (which is great considering the tiny size of this thing) Next to no noise, and very cheap. Now, Windows Home Server is a great home server operating system, but Linux is what really rocks my boat, so I started thinking about how to get Linux on this box even before ever booting the pre-installed Windows Server.

How do we developers best describe our work?

Half a year ago I ended up in a really interesting conversation with Erlend Klakegg Bergheim about how we as programmers describe our work to non-programmers. I decided to write up a blog post on the subject to try and retrieve some feedback and opinions from others, but ultimately ended up postponing it indefinitely. This summer though, the same conversation came up during lunch, and my interest was sparked again, so I finally decided to write up some of my thoughts.

Mplayer doesn't stream from stdin without cache setting

I just noticed that mplayer no longer wants to stream from stdin when I unrared my files straigth to mplayer using unrar p -inul some_multipart.rar | mplayer - like I’ve often done before, giving me errors like this instead: Cannot seek backward in linear streams! Seek failed This behaviour has probably existed for a while, however I haven’t noticed it before since I’ve actually been using a workaround for this anyways.