The following tip was developed using Ubuntu 9.1x (Hardy Heron) with OpenVPn 2.1rc19. It builds on the the setup from Part I.

Part I of this guide to configuring a local firewall for OpenVPN introduced you to using iptables on Linux. It also included a script for OpenVPN that opened and closed the firewall for specific IP addresses. If you haven’t read it already, you should probably go do that first.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the firewall configuration from part I is not watertight... [More]

From the article, Roubini on Greece by Felix Salmon (Reuters):

“Sweden’s Bo Lundgren was also on the panel, and he helped explain how the Swedish population has the crucial and decidedly un-Greek ability to unite behind unpopular yet necessary policies once their political leaders have set a certain course. Greece, which is already seeing riots at any hint of fiscal austerity, just isn’t the kind of nation which is likely to decide that five years of wage cuts in a painful and deflationary recession is a price worth... [More]”

Fans would give up food, jobs for World Cup glory? (Reuters) is a tremendously fluffy and stupid article. Did they actually interview people or did they just make this shit up based on gross cultural stereotypes?

“It found that a majority of English respondents – 93 percent – would give up food for a week to see England win, while some 70 percent of Italians would give up their job for an Italian victory.

“Americans were most willing to sacrifice their homes, while South Koreans were most ready to... [More]”

Jesse Ventura is a former pro wrestler and action movie star—he famously starred in Predator with Schwarzenegger. He claims to have been in the Navy Seals—though it turns out he was in the predecessor to the Seals and never actually saw combat in ‘Nam, though he trained for it. He was elected governor of Minnesota as an independent and went on to write a book about conspiracies to accompany a TV show about conspiracies. He’s a self-professed 9–11 truther.

He sounds like a joke, really. A... [More]

Alternate title: Why Reddit is so awesome.

The post “Eyjafjallajökull” isn’t as foreign to English as it sounds (Reddit) is in the linquistics Reddit (to which I am subscribed, natch) and is treasure-trove of crowdsourcing goodness vis-à-vis the etymology, pronunciation (OGG file[1]) and unique linquistic characteristics of spoken Icelandic. There is no way I would have guessed the pronunciation from the spelling; the native Icelander seems to elide quite a bit, but what do I know about Icelandic... [More]

The following tip was developed using Ubuntu 9.1x (Hardy Heron) with OpenVPn 2.1rc19. It was originally published on the Encodo blogs and cross-published here.

There are dozens of guides around that describe how to optimally configure the iptables firewall on Linux for OpenVPN. There’s even a script installed by default that is extremely well-commented and shows to how close down the firewall, then open up only very selected ports and protocols for optimal browsing. However, all of those... [More]

A little while ago, WikiLeaks released a video showing a U.S. helicopter in Iraq on patrol in 2007. During its patrol, it engaged and killed several Iraqis. Despite several Freedom of Information requests, the Pentagon refused to release the video because two of the slain turned out to have been reporters for Reuter’s. The full, unencrypted video was finally leaked by Pentagon personnel and posted on the Internet. There is a 38–minute version and a 17–minute version. The shorter version is... [More]

Opera software is ordinarily quite stable. Released versions are rock-solid, running for weeks—even months—at a time. Betas are also usually very good and even Alphas (for those of us in the testing program) are quite stable. Sometimes, however, we testers get saddled with a very bad version. A recent build has the tendency to crash completely on its own: Look away for a few minutes and, instead of your browser window with many tabs, the crash dialog is on-screen, waiting for a report.
... [More]

Apple presented the iPhone OS 4.0 late last week. The new version includes hundreds of new API calls for third-party developers, including long-sought-after support for multi-tasking. The changes extended to the licensing agreement for iPhone developers, with section 3.3.1 getting considerable modification, as documented in the article, Adobe man to Apple: ‘Go screw yourself’ by Cade Metz (The Register). That section now reads:

“Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by... [More]”

I’ve been using Mercurial for a little over a year now, but I’m still kind of a newbie because:

1. I don’t use it every day
2. I use it only for private projects, so there aren’t many merge issues

For earthli.com development, I have two repositories: One for the web site content itself and another for the earthli WebCore, the backend for the web site. For each of these projects, I have the following repositories:

• Local repository
• Server repository (development)
• Server repository (production)

... [More]

At the end of last year, a bit of very good news emerged from the otherwise increasingly draconian U.S. As detailed in the article Did a Court Just Deal a Fatal Blow to Tasers for Police? by Raj Jayadev (AlterNet), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals made what appeared to be a landmark decision that, in cases where officers used tasers, “[t]he objective facts must indicate that the suspect poses an immediate threat to the officer or a member of the public.”

Unfortunately, this sounds much better than it is, because of the... [More]

There are some for whom the dream of going to war with Iran has not died. As succinctly detailed in the article What War with Iran Means by Patrick Buchanan (Antiwar.com), these criminally insane members of the Senate have expressed themselves in no uncertain terms:

From the article Torture: Business as Usual? by Michael Berubé (Dissent Magazine):

“[I]t’s crucial to know when you’re dealing with a radical break and crucial not to normalize it by saying, in effect, move on, move on, nothing new to see here.”

But Chomsky doesn’t really say “move on, move on, nothing new to see here”, does he?. To me, Chomsky’s leftism always seemed to emphasize the importance of tackling what is in fact not an ephemeral or generational problem. It may be a hopeless endeavor because no one is listening, but... [More]

Who would have thought twenty years ago that Steve Jobs would be the guy taking his company to ever-more-dizzying heights of nigh-monopolistic rapacity and peddling locked-in consumerism and that Bill Gates would be in Africa curing malaria and trying solve climate change. It’s a funny old world.

Apple announced its iPad to mixed reviews a little over a month ago. They plan to start shipping the device on April 3rd and are taking pre-orders now. A plethora of detail as well as succulent photos... [More]

The health care bill has passed the Congress and most of the world is assuming that it will pass through the Senate as well. The reconciled bill is much closer to the original House bill than to the Senate bill, so that assumption seems a bit premature. Though the Senate’s 41 Republicans will definitely vote against it, the Democrats have to hope that the changes don’t cause enough defections by so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats. Perhaps none of them are willing to risk the political damage at... [More]

Heat is a very accessible book on the state of the world’s climate, energy and heating needs today and going into the future. The author sets himself the task of coming up with a plan for our planet that is economically, socially and climatologically viable. His express goal is to keep convenience and freedom as much like it is now as possible while reducing CO2 emissions by 90% across the board—domestic usage, air travel, industrial, transports, construction and so on.

He will not... [More]

From the world of misleading propaganda journalism comes this story: Social Security to start cashing Uncle Sam’s IOUs by Stephen Ohlemacher (Yahoo! News). First off, the author makes sure to use the term IOU right in the title to get people into the right frame of mind. If they get the mistaken impression that the Social Security is issuing IOUs, then that’s a real shame.

Before analyzing any further, a quick recap of how Social Security works is in order. Social Security is individually funded by a special tax (FICA) and, as... [More]

Bill Gates is the world’s most generous philanthropist and has made curing malaria and combating viruses of all kinds his new goal in life (see Mosquitoes, Malaria and Education by Bill Gates (TED) for the video). However, he’s changed his focus to climate change because, though preventing disease is a huge concern for the third world, rampaging climate change will make many more things far worse for the world’s poor. As he put it in his talk, Innovating to zero! by Bill Gates (TED):

“But energy and climate are extremely important to... [More]”

A rather interesting article about innumeracy on ABC News was almost completely overshadowed by a layout dominated by advertisements for other products also available from ABC. Anyone happy to read content for free online should also be prepared for a shameless onslaught of self-promotion, but does it have to be so ugly? The page is broken into dozens of blocks (listed below), which seem to only coincidentally line up or share a common style.

Take into account that most of the blocks are... [More]

If you’ve been looking for an introduction to Quantum Computing and how it surpasses our current binary computing, the article A tale of two qubits: how quantum computers work by Joseph B. Altepeter (Ars Technica) is a great place to start. The language is about as accessible as it’s going to get and there are helpful diagrams sprinkled throughout. For example, the engine of a quantum computer—entanglement, and its result: “action at a distance”—is analogized thusly:

“Imagine if someone showed you a pair of coins, claiming that... [More]”

Short Track (or How Sports Works for the uninitiated)

Short track speed skating got the short shrift right up until the end from Eurosport. Apparently, there was a bit of a controversy with one of Apolo Anton Ohno’s races. More details are available in the article, Apolo Ohno Disqualified in 500 Meters, Wins Relay Bronze (Fanhouse)

I didn’t see the video because of the blanket NBC hatred for non-US residents and the NBC stranglehold on video content from the Olympics.

That does not prevent me from... [More]

The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world (Intelligence^2) is a debate between Archbishop Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe (for the Church) and Christoper Hitchens and Stephen Fry (against the Church). The link has all of the videos linked in from YouTube[1] and it’s worth watching all of it, especially since the audience gets to vote twice: once at the beginning and once at the end.[2]

It is interesting not because those supporting the Church actually argued well, but because those against the church did.... [More]

TV Coverage

The only reason anyone can niggle about anything about TV coverage is because it does so many things right.[1] And, if you don’t like what Eurosport is showing, switch to another channel that’s showing something else. Other channels, like ORF (Austrian), the triad of Swiss channels (SF, TSR, TSI), and ARD (German) are also showing nearly nonstop coverage. You may not get it in a language you understand – and you may have to adjust your sleep schedule – but if it’s happening, at... [More]

In years past, it’s always been more interesting to read the Transcript of the State of the Union Address (NY Times) (in this instance, Obama’s first, in 2010) than to listen to it. It is in the reading that one gets a good sense of what the president thinks he can get away with. Remember Bush spending minutes talking about the steroid problem in high school sports as two wars he started raged? Remember his talk of a Mars shot when he needed to distract attention from some debacle? Well, now it’s Obama’s... [More]

First up in a wonderful report from John Oliver, covering the recent Republican retreat in Hawaii. The angle is that the Republicans made a lot of hey about Obama being from Hawaii and continuing to vacation there, claiming it made him out-of-touch with the American people (it being taken for granted that Obama is to blame for his place of birth). Hawaii is, in general, one of the more expensive places to live in America, so the claim is not wholly without worth. However, watching the... [More]

Though it sometimes seems that religion always has the upper hand in public debate, there is usually at least one crusader per generation willing to come out strongly in favor of the Enlightenment and against superstition. The article Mencken, Islam, and Political Correctness (Capitalism Magazine) cites the early 20th-century journalist H.L. Mencken on the subject of religion and other closely related superstitions.

“What the World’s contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in... [More]”

Ever since Apple starting shipping software on the Windows platform—before iTunes, Apple’s presence was considerably smaller—users have complained of its rather aggresive installation policy. If you wanted Quicktime, the Apple site offered Quicktime+iTunes; when you installed iTunes, you were asked whether you wanted Safari. Though extra software could all be avoided by reading before installing, the fact is that most users simply accept the defaults. In Apple’s defense, their checkboxes... [More]