The right-hand column on the BBC site has a link to a story called "Europe is 'losing' superbugs battle". The current story is a case in point: Europe is losing big time against the sinister "Stupidity" superbug.

I'd be more than a little surprised if any part of the US government would in fact agree to let non-disclosure agreements expire automatically. That alone makes me suspicious that the truth content of these allegations is a little thin.

For those of you who are interested in finding out the facts, start by reading the whole thread on openbsd-tech (eg http://marc.info/?t=129236639300001&r=1&w=2 ), it's only a handful of messages so far and I find Damien Miller's response at http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129237675106730&w=2 particularly enlightening. (You're using Damien's code right now, in some other window -- he's been a major OpenSSH developer for quite a while).

Then again, I have to agree with Bob Beck (see http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236730027908&w=2 ) that this is fairly likely to part of a personal vendetta of some sort, possibly against either the OpenBSD project or even something totally unrelated, using the OpenBSD project only as the attention-grabber in contexts such as /.

At this point we have only allegations with some finger pointing, I for one look forward to any real information to surface. The best way to draw out the real information behind this is to do what Theo did - publish the allegations and let the involved parties explain themselves in public.

- such as No Starch press (http://nostarch.com), and quite possibly others.

I find it's always worth mentioning that there are publishers out there who respect their customers enough to not do the DRM dance, and from the author's view (yes, I am one) the danger of people not reading your stuff is more scary than the danger of not getting paid for every last copy.

Full disclosure: I have a book out on No Starch, The Book of PF, 2nd ed.

It's probably worth mentioning that there's at least one tech books publisher that publishes e-book versions in several formats (IIRC you get them all in a zip archive), with no DRM. That publisher is No Starch Press (http://nostarch.com).

I think for most of the writers who publish on No Starch, the thinking is that readers should have access to the material the form that's convenient to them, with as few restrictions as possible. For my own part, I see the bittorent trackers that turned up about four hours after the PDF version of the first edition of my book mainly as a sign that people appreciate my work.

Full disclosure: I have a title out on No Starch that's been available as ebook before the printed version is available (expected about Nov 10th), see http://nostarch.com/pf2.htm

For /etc upgrades, there's sysmerge.

In fact, you can run sysmerge -x xetcNN.tgz -s etcNN.tgz and answer the friendly prompts before booting into the installer for the upgrade. Then after you've done the base system upgrade, set your PKG_PATH to something sensible and run pkg_add -u to upgrade your packages. Time needed is mainly a function of how good your connectivity to the packages mirror is.

There's a series of pictures at http://bsdly.blogspot.com/2010/01/goodness-of-men-and-machinery.html that tell you what the installer looked like in January. IIRC no huge changes have happened to it since then. But do try 4.8 or a recent snapshot (they come with installNN.iso files these days)

Repetition by hand, even by a skilled operator, is error prone. I think that's the main message in this article, and I couldn't agree more. The task at hand doesn't even have to be that complex. That's why, in a system administration context, tools like puppet (http://www.puppetlabs.com/) and cfengine (http://cfengine.com) make so much sense. Tools like those help you make sure that items that need to be the same stay the same, and make sure changes happen in sync across systems when need be (courtesy of your version control system). And of course, local variations can be catered to in a number of ways and maintained across global reconfigurations. If you're lucky enogh to be working on a Unix or BSD, that is. Not sure what's available in Cisco or Windows space.

This makes it fairly obvious that it was actually toads, not mice, that rigged up the earth in the first place.

Nice bit of coverup, Douglas!

Next up, what species if not the dolphins? And what's the real qoute behind "So long and thanks for all the fish?"?

In Europe, checks are rare if not extinct, for something like the last 10 years at least. Direct transfers (IBAN) or similar just work and most people here do their banking mainly online anyhow.

Most likely you could talk your bank here into issuing a check for you if you ask them nicely, but it would almost certainly be more expensive than a straight electronic transfer.

On the other hand, somebody likely had fun and made a modest amount of money developing that check scannin app, so the effort I guess is not totally wasted.