Software Cooperative News

A periodic security review at our co-op suggested switching PasswordAuthentication no on even more hosts. One of those caused a bit of a heated discussion about the benefits of increased security and the drawbacks of making emergency access harder, reminding me of the old joke about a secure computer being one encased in a [...]

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The debian GNU/Linux kernel’s firmware content is one of the most troubling bugs, and (as I understand it):

it mostly came from upstream (so fixing it only in debian isn’t sustainable),

it’s something some FSF supporters kick us for (often while ignoring other not-aiming-for-100%-free systems and turning a blind eye to the non-program problem in their own [...]

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I’ve been mouthing off about Ubuntu again, after the forthcoming release parties were advertised in some pretty inappropriate places, lamenting:
“Ubuntu has taken a voluntary-sector aim-for-100%-free distribution, built a private-sector free-and-non-free distribution and gets more love and free marketing from free software supporters than its parent, or than the whole-community events.”

However, I did surprise someone by [...]

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Our co-op uses the git revision control system pretty extensively, both directly and through etckeeper. With more workers, we’re keeping more shared copies of our git repositories. So inevitably, we ran into permissions problems.
Thanks a lot to Moser for pointing out the git repo-config core.sharedRepository true option. I’ve also had a bit [...]

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I’ve seen a couple of the conversation-spams described in Misspelled nemesis club: A new twist on spam? It looks like they exploit the typically weak moderation practices of many software discussion mailing lists. Do you think they are human-powered? Are they caught out if you set “default_member_moderation” (new list member postings are [...]

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