killbox

If ya get a chance, checkout the webcast of PBS's Masterpiece contemporary show, miniseries "The Last Enemy"

Its finally all up, its pretty good. Real Science kinda flung a bit forward. Dark future, of the TIA

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/lastenemy/index.html

I don't know how long it will be up.

Rooftop Watchers, "Snipers at the gates of dawn"

The EFF asks for your help in this last ditch effort to keep congress from granting immunity to telecos who overstepped the law at the request of the executive branch.

Please take a few moments to skim over the repost below this cut and decide if oyu have a few min to call or write a quick email in support.

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Anybody have any ideas/experience with maintaining public use (classroom) computers?

I have been sorta Self Tasked with maintaining a classroom of less than 20 computers. these willbe used for training, and other semi public use tasks.

The computers as they stand do a dual boot. (debian/xphome) we want to both make those computers more secure(functional but free from spyware/viruses/user installed crap), but also make the patch/update progress as easy as possible.

as far as i have figured it, there are a couple of ways,

one way,
Maintain like 20 separate images (ghost or something like that) push those configs out to each computer (i would do a single config, but due to microsoft licensing they all need a unique serial and im sure some of the hardware is unique). any system like this will be a pain for the nearly daily antivirus/windws updates.

the other way, use some sort of incremental backup so we can roll back to a clean state, plus some sort of lockdown software. Deep Freeze (faronics.com) or something like that? (any suggestions?), updating the computers will still be a pain, but probably better

and the last way, would be to combine the system images mentioned in the first way, but then just rely on windows's system restore, to put the pc's back into a state when they were known to be clean and ok. and restoring them when they get to buggy/full of crap.

any ideas(pitfalls to avoid) or advise would be welcome!

everybody else is doing it..

5 years ago, a short bit after waking up and realizing my snooze alarm radio has been talking about a plane crash for longer than the average news story. the phone rang with my flatmate's sister on the CID much earlier than i would have expected. wandered upstairs to see my flatmate on the couch watching the tv.

after a bit of the rubberneck, and "wow that's fucked-up" there was this point where the dark humor of the moment set in, and we discussed the silly things that might go through ones mind as they jumped from the burning buildings.

a hour or so later i renewed my EFF membership, and my ACLU membership, fired off 4 emails tom my congress critters begging them not to "Knee jerk react with legislation, do not in the heat of the moment do things your grandchildren will have to live to regret!" (it failed, they passed the P.A.T.R.I.O.T act, and rolled over giving away the authorization for war)

I then fired off another email to a listserve i was on, titled, "Fuck ECHELON!!!" stating that the little battles we had fought for privacy are over it is all lost.

I in my life have never wanted to be wrong more!