My Quiet Life

Fox News just had some ape in an oversized suit (the local manager, I guess) giving a political diatribe where he referred to the french as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”.

Maybe they forgot to tell him he was on TV.

Ideally, any GNU/Linux server should be behind a firewall. However, sometimes you don’t have a choice. My nameservers are great examples of this — they just aren’t in places where a firewall is practical, and Cisco IOS ACLs are an unsavory alternative because they are easily (inadvertently) blown away.

So, it’s important to know how to secure GNU/Linux so that you can confidently put it on the Internet without fear of compromise. It’s not as difficult as it may seem.

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Joshua Micah Marshall links to his appearance on a panel on neoconservatism (covered by C-SPAN), which pits him against Richard Perle, among others.

It’s a pretty interesting debate, but the beginning is particularly funny to me. The moderator makes a big deal about the passions arisen by such a topic and to please avoid the ad hominem attacks. Richard Perle, in his introductory remarks, then opens with two snide comments in a row directed at Josh, one of them a blatant ad hominem about Josh spending “every waking moment” on his blog, and the “left’s obsession with neoconservatism”. Nice. The moderator should have put him on time-out in the corner until he can behave around the grown-ups.

Josh was pretty eloquent in defending his assertions and presenting a case against the neoconservative foreign strategy. Check it out.

Looks like OpenBSD 3.5 is shaping up to add many improvements that will suit its use in load-balanced/failover applications. This is a crucial step for competing with products like CheckPoint, which have (using VRRP) some pretty advanced redundant failover capability.

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Amanda is currently taking a Political Theory class, and they are discussing some things I found interesting. One of the papers she had to write is presented below: an answer to the question (paraphrased): “Are we obligated to obey government?” The paper draws heavily on a few previous papers that discuss the arbitrary nature of morality and such, but nonetheless I thought it’d be pretty interesting on its own. I thought it was a great answer, but it probably raises as many questions as it answers. Enjoy!
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