LookIt

Free Wifi in airplanes: somewhat fail

I post this as I am flying on Virgin America. The part about "blogging while flying" is cute, maybe even useful. What is not all that useful at the moment is the wireless connection. It is slow almost (but not completely) to the point of distraction. The slowness, I believe, is not due to the inherent slowness of the uplink/downlink, but instead because Google is running a promotion with Virgin to give everyone free Wifi during the holidays. I was on another full Virgin flight earlier this year, and I didn't really mind paying the $10ish for the connection, and it was much faster than this one.

I hope Google and Virgin America (and their wireless provider, Aircell) are getting some good data on what happens when you get as many people as possible using wireless on the flight at the same time. It should help them in determining a good price that will cause enough people not to use it to make it useful to those of us who are. From looking around the plane, I believe about 50 folks are using the service at the moment (out of 122 very full seats on the flight). It would be interesting to see what cutting that down to 25 would do to the bandwidth.

Wondering about FreeBSD?

Here's a great comparison between FreeBSD and Linux. It is obviously slanted towards FreeBSD, but it covers well the main advantages for FreeBSD. I have been a FreeBSD partisan for a long time, although I have been forced to use Linux more in the past few years. All my outward-facing servers run FreeBSD, and I made that decision years ago based on the same features listed in the comparison.

The comparison, however, misses the main advantage of some of the Linux distros, namely that they have many more users and so lazyweb support is better. But that's true for only maybe two or three distros (most notably Ubuntu), and even then you still have to deal with the "it's OK if it only kinda works" mentality in the Linux world that is much less prevalent in the FreeBSD world. If you're running a host with a mix of server software, you will find that the package system on FreeBSD is much, much easier to deal with than on most of the Linux distros, even though the Linux world has more help available.

The article above comes from my FreeBSD hosting service, RootBSD, who have been rock-solid for me. They have low prices, good service, and they know FreeBSD much better than any of the other host operators I looked into. My main server is colocated at a different ISP, but I would heartily recommend RootBSD to anyone who wants a virtual server running FreeBSD.

All security tools must be about preventing hacking

This is just sad. This article's lede says "The National Institute of Standards and Technology released on Friday a revised draft to security metrics used by federal agencies to test how well their computer systems fight off hacking attempts." The article is about a new draft of FIPS 140, which talks about how to test whether or not software or hardware conforms to US requirements for cryptography. It has nothing to do with "hacking attempts". "Hacking" has now subsumed all security discussions, unfortunately.

(FWIW, I do not link to FIPS 140 above because it is actually a set of many documents. People who only go here will definitely not understand all they need to know about the testing.)

How much less clear can Facebook be?

Lots of people are piling on Facebook's crappy new privacy settings. Today, a friend logged into Facebook and was completely confused by the new, mandatory privacy settings.

Does that mean:
(a) Everyone is locked from seeing the "About me"
(b) Everyone is allowed to see the "About me"

The answer is (b), probably much to the surprise of many Facebook users.