Oh, wait, you didn't need to pass a test for that.

I'm just trying to think how that would have been possible. I think back then there was a medical exception you could plead for. I didn't. I passed the 20 WPM test fair and square and got K6BP as a vanity call, long before there was any way to get that call without passing a 20 WPM test.

Unfortunately, ARRL did fight to keep those code speeds in place, and to keep code requirements, for the last several decades that I know of and probably continuously since 1936. Of course there was all of the regulation around incentive licensing, where code speeds were given a primary role. Just a few years ago, they sent Rod Stafford to the final IARU meeting on the code issue with one mission: preventing an international vote for removal of S25.5 . They lost.

I am not blaming this on ARRL staff and officers. Many of them have privately told me of their support, including some directors and their First VP, now SK. It's the membership that has been the problem.

I am having a lot of trouble believing the government agency and NGO thing, as well. I talked with some corporate emergency managers as part of my opposition to the encryption proceeding (we won that too, by the way, and I dragged an unwilling ARRL, who had said they would not comment, into the fight). Big hospitals, etc.

What I got from the corporate folks was that their management was resistant to using Radio Amateurs regardless of what the law was. Not that they were chomping at the bit waiting to be able to carry HIPAA-protected emergency information via encrypted Amateur radio. Indeed, if you read the encryption proceeding, public agencies and corporations hardly commented at all. That point was made very clearly in FCC's statement - the agencies that were theorized by Amateurs to want encryption didn't show any interest in the proceeding.

So, I am having trouble believing that the federal agency and NGO thing is real because of that.

The Technican Element 3 test wasn't more difficult than the Novice Element 1 and 2 together, so Technican became the lowest license class when they stopped having to take Element 1.

The change to 13 WPM was in 1936, and was specifically to reduce the number of Amateur applicants. It was 10 WPM before that. ARRL asked for 12.5 WPM in their filing, FCC rounded the number because they felt it would be difficult to set 12.5 on the Instructograph and other equipment available for code practice at the time.

It was meant to keep otherwise-worthy hams out of the hobby. And then we let that requirement keep going for 60 years.

The Indianapolis cop episode was back in 2009. It wasn't the first time we've had intruders, and won't be the last, and if you have to reach back that long for an example, the situation can't be that bad. It had nothing to do with code rules or NGOs getting their operators licenses.

A satphone is less expensive than a trained HF operator. Iridium costs $30 per month and $0.89 per minute to call another Iridium phone. That's the over-the-counter rate. Government agencies get a better rate than that. And the phone costs $1100, again that's retail not the government rate, less than an HF rig with antenna and tower will cost any public agency to install.

You think it's a big deal to lobby against paid operators because there will be objections? How difficult do you think it was to reform the code regulations? Don't you think there were lots of opposing comments?

And you don't care about young people getting into Amateur Radio. That's non-survival thinking.

Fortunately, when the real hams go to get something done, folks like you aren't hard to fight, because you don't really do much other than whine and send in the occassional FCC comment. Do you know I even spoke in Iceland when I was lobbying against the code rules? Their IARU vote had the same power as that of the U.S., and half of the hams in the country came to see me. That's how you make real change.

I like fail2ban. I started installing it on servers when I discovered a firewall getting so many SSH connections it couldn't hold anymore.

The only reason I found that was happening is my Nagios instance threw up a flag upon no longer being able to SSH into the firewall.

If you monitor for stability you will see security issues. If you code for security you will see stability. They tend to go hand in hand.

About 4 years ago I came into a business where the security cameras were all older coax models that wired up to capture cards and into a ZoneMinder install. It worked but was cumbersome and I figured it was time to start us getting on IP cameras. We had a new "store" location being built right around the time so I moved everything to IP cameras and ditched ZoneMinder for BlueCherry.

I've never regretted that. BlueCherry is really nice and I see it constantly improving. I don't think I've seen a single new feature introduced in the 4 years I've been using it. Instead they just keep making it better at what it really needs to do. They won't make it limit FPS from a camera. The camera can do that. A timestamp on the image? The camera should do that. Do you want to delete video? Nope. There's no reason for that. The system will eventually cycle it out when the disk is full. They don't work on fluff or things you THINK you need. They work on stability and resource consumption and things that you absolutely need in a video recording system before anything else. I like their approach.

As to cameras I'm not much help. I run about 26 Axis M-1011 or M-1011W (wireless version) cameras one ACTi E33 outdoor bullet camera, and two TRENDNet TV-IP252P dome cameras. I have tried a junk Foscam and HooToo model or two in the past but they were junk and you had to power cycle them randomly to get them back online. A $60 Foscam with PTZ that works MOST of the thing isn't worth anything to me. An Axis M-1011 with no PTZ and smple 640x480 resolution but runs nonstop 365 days a year? That's worth $175 to me. My ACTi E33 has also been reliable for a solid year now and I'm buying more. My TRENDNet TV-IP252P are annoying as hell. They just quit working at random. Their web interface is up, they respond to ICMP pings, but their RTSP feed goes down or borks up bad enough that BlueCherry can't decipher it anymore. I have to powercycle them when I see they're not reading right and I do not like them.

My Axis cameras do go offline sometimes but that's where we power cycle between the grid and generator. We only have a 2 second gap between the two and that seems to catch some cameras in a weird state. Thankfully with them when they go whacky they stop responding to ICMP and HTTP requests to my Nagios install picks up on them being off and I can fix that before it's an issue.

Yep, there are a lot of flashing lights and beeps sending code in the computer world. I still hear phones using "... -- ..." to indicate an incoming SMS.

OpenSSL has first-to-market advantage, and anyone who hasn't evaluated the quality differences will choose the simpler license. Plus there are other alternatives, like Amazon's new SSL-in-5000-lines which is also gift-licensed.

The time for OpenSSL to dual-license was when it was the only available alternative to entirely proprietary implementations. That might indeed have funded a quality improvement.

I don't know a thing about the quality of GnuTLS or the Amazon thing. I've seen enough of the insides of OpenSSL to know it's not pretty, but am not a crypto guy and this don't work on it.

Maintaining FIPS compliance did not make anything easier. It's essentially a prohibition on bug repair, as you have to recertify afterward. But the people who wanted FIPS were the only ones who were actually paying for someone to work on OpenSSL.

I don't think any of the other Free Software projects ever tried to be FIPS certified.

If you are one of the infringed parties, I'd be happy to talk with you about what your options are. bruce at perens dot com or +1 510-4PERENS (I'm not there today, but it will take a message). I am not a lawyer but I work with the good ones and can bring them into the conversation if necessary.

As a community we've managed to almost completely ignore that because of their use of dual-licensing, MySQL made 1.1 Billion dollars after 9 years in business, and that for a database that was written by one person, and the code base remained available under the GPL.

IMO, 1.1 Billion dollars is pretty damn impressive. Especially if you get paid that to make Free Software. Heck, sign me up!

Oracle was a bad actor, and Monty is now leading further development of that same code base under the GPL. But it did not have to be that way.

How do you prove damages or have the right to settle violations if you don't have copyright?

If you have been doing enough work to justify getting paid for the software, you have an ample amount of your own copyrighted work to base your claim upon. If you haven't done that much work, what are you suing for?

You can also get a grant of the right to sue from your contributors. You can include in the agreement how you will apportion damages: for example you could take the ratio of your lines of modified code checked in vs. that of contributed code checked in, and give that portion of damages to FSF.