Australian here. I noticed that some time in the last few years, my phone (N900 at the time which I could once remotely SSH into from home) was now behind NAT and unreachable. It might not be a crisis, but it's still a PITA.

I know what you mean. We started using Salt Stack at my workplace because it was a clear advantage over the previous way we were managing our infrastructure configuration, and perhaps because of that interest and enthusiasm, the process of migrating was much easier - even though the setup can be complex.

In the case of systemd and friends, the question of how this is going to advantage my job/workflow or my workplace specifically, is less clear. I guess this is a good argument for some early initial investigation so we can hopefully find that answer and motivate ourselves.

That's true. Point taken.

Nice! I like your style. :)

But I think you've been quite lucky to not have needed to touch it. I've frequently had to edit /etc/inittab (usually to change getty settings), change runlevel configurations, or package software with init scripts that need tweaking.

From my point of view, I don't care about saving 5 seconds of boot time. I'm more concerned about ease of configuration and maintenance, as well as reliability.

Then you must be administering Windows boxes.

I agree. Install Firefox Mobile with the Phony extension. Then select "Desktop Firefox" for the User Agent. Soooo much better. :)

I used to work with a guy who had to get scanned by an airport residue scanner, on the same day that he had been using competitive firearms all morning in practice. He was happy to openly admit it to them (this was in Australia), but the scanner didn't pick up anything at all.

Doesn't matter if it's proprietary software or just adware you want to cut back on (or possibly even eliminate almost entirely if using Replicant), F-droid has you covered. It's not that hard to give Google Apps the flick with all the alternative free software out there, if one can be motivated to do so.

Chroot's still aren't as good. My N900 could run some games I made using PyGAME (all I had to do was something like sudo apt-get install python-pygame) and it was good to go - ran the game just as well as my laptop did, with acceleration. Beautiful.

Unfortunately my N900 screen broke for a second time last year, and I threaded one of the screws trying to replace it, so I too found myself looking for a replacement phone. Even with overclocking the N900 was painfully slow on complex websites, so I wanted something modern but with a hardware keyboard. I couldn't find anything except possibly the Neo900 (which didn't have an ETA at the time - and I wouldn't have been able to wait for anyway), so I decided that I would get the biggest screen I could find - the logic being that if I have to use a virtual keyboard I want it to provide an experience as close to a hardware keyboard as possible.

Hence, I now run a Sony Xperia Z Ultra with the Hacker's Keyboard. Obviously not as good as a hardware keyboard, but the screen size means the virtual keyboard can fit all keys I had on the N900 (and then some) and still have plenty of room to see the text-box I'm typing into.

The Xperial Z Ultra also has expandable storage so a chroot is feasible, and I admit I've used this phone much more than my N900 due to it being more practical for games, e-mail, taking pictures, etc. Sony also provide instructions on unlocking the bootloader. However, lacking a true GNU userland environment for the primary OS, along with lacking the ease of gaining root and lacking a replaceable battery) are things I really miss. I also hate how much of the bloatware cannot be removed, although it can be disabled. It is waterproof though, so it's got that going for it.

I nuked or disabled almost everything related to Sony and Google Play and installed F-Droid instead, and then proceeded to install Firefox Mobile, K-9 and APG, Xabber, TTRSS-Reader, VLC, Open Explorer, Barcode Scanner, Terminal Emulator, Cool Reader, Document Viewer, Aard, OsmAnd~, ScummVM, AnkiDroid, World Clock, VX ConnectBot, a few ownCloud-related sync apps... and of course Frozen Bubble, and now Android can do most of the things I would have used my N900 for.

$ echo QUIT | openssl s_client -connect slashdot.org:443 | openssl x509 -text

Yeah, that's just sad. You'd think a popular technology news website such as Slashdot, of all places, would be on the ball and at least support TLS traffic... but it's actually worse than that. They're not lazy (they have a GeoTrust wildcard certificate issued back in April last year) but deliberately don't want people securing their connections, hence the 302 redirection the have in place. :(

I would have been really interested in this. Actually, I almost went to Korea over the Xmas holidays anyway, but learned that they require fingerprinting now for non-citizens. I ended up staying in Hong Kong instead for the entire duration of my holiday just because of this point. I refuse to be treated like that.

http://www.businesstraveller.a...

I see some countries even require visitors to take an iris scan. That's insane.

http://www.stallman.org/bad-bo...

I just got back from a trip to Hong Kong, and the shape of keyboards I used there somewhat resembled the parent poster's layout description (with the exception of the ~ key relocation). Granted this could be related to Hong Kong's history as a British colony and might well be different to mainland?

Then as root just install a key logger?

Either the WiFi password is decrypted with a user password (eg. local machine account log-in password), or the WiFi password is supplied directly by the user. No problem.