There are way more Internet users outside of the US many of them with faster Internet at cheaper rates. The two biggest Internet exchanges are in Frankfurt (DE-CIX) and Amsterdam (AMS-IX) and in terms of traffic peaks and traffic transfers they leave the US as a tiny dot in their rear-view mirror. The biggest e-commerce market in the world when measured by the amount spent per capita? The UK, in 2010. The e-commerce market in absolute numbers in China will at least equal but probably surpass the US in 2013. And that's only one of the BRIC countries. Now add Japan (Rakuten) and Europe and it's easy to see that the Internet is global and definitely not US centric. Anyone who thinks that follies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram make up the majority of the Intertubes is probably American, thinks Fox News tells the truth and has never left his/her country :-) The same goes for those fine optical cables transporting all those cat videos. Most cables are not owned by US companies. And most cables are not even near the US. US companies may lease fibre in those cables but that's not the same. Have a look at all submarine cables here: http://submarine-cable-map-2013.telegeography.com/ Building your own Internet is a matter of finding the cash, hiring one of those cable ships and put your cable between point A and B. Next thing you will do is hook it up to an Internet exchange at which point it will start to transport traffic from the US (the NSA, cat videos) and to the US (the NSA backup, when posting, tweeting, tumblering and instagramming about those cat videos). The only place where the Internet is US centric is in regulatory control: ICANN. It's time ICANN got replaced by an extension of the IETF located outside of the US in a neutral place like Switzerland. ICANN can keep .com, and .mil but anything else should get transferred to the new organization. And no I will not hold my breath for that to happen any time soon.

There is this neat concept called "peering". A massive amount of Google's traffic does not go through public ports on Internet Exchanges. Instead it's delivered to Google caching nodes hosted at ISPs around the world and delivered from those caching nodes directly to the ISPs customer. This saves a few zillion petabytes in bandwidth (and dollars). By the way, it looks like the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, AMS-IX, has overtaken DE-CIX as the biggest Internet Exchange in the world.

Anything pro-GMO should be subject to extreme scrutiny and is probably Monsanto playing the field. This pro-GMO guy is from a Spanish university and it's obvious that Spain is pretty far up the creek with a gigantic unemployment rate and staggering debt which surely had an impact on his university's funding. So where is the Monsanto link? Did anyone follow the money? Who funded their pro-GMO research? GMO is a bad idea and Monsanto's GMO patents and their litigation are in an evil scale of their own.

"Since then it has been very public with Oracle Linux"

Ah you're maybe referring to the CentOS-like clone they created from Red Hat's source packages. Once they spun their isos and slapped together a 3 page website they went after Red Hat's customers saying "their" so called unbreakable Linux is better than Red Hat's. That same unbreakable Linux which is based *entirely* on Red Hat's source packages. That's pretty evil in my book. Add how they are shielding off MySQL bugs and development and what they did to OpenSolaris and you get a pretty clear picture of a dinosaur-going-the-way-of-the-dodo who's trashing anything Open while giving in to its insatiable hunger for ginormous license fees and sending ginormous invoices to misguided customers for their $1000-suit "consultants".

It makes total sense to migrate to MariaDB, Percona, EnterpriseDB or PostgreSQL as fast as you can. While you are at it replace BerkeleyDB with LMDB. Last time I looked OpenLDAP, Postfix, OpenDKIM and other projects already support it. And it's faster and more reliable than BerkeleyDB too.

The only way Oracle will (hopefully) make some attempt to become a proper member of our Community is when they feel it where it hurts most: revenue streams. So slam the door in the face of that pompous Oracle rep, don't renew the license(s), drink the F/OSS Cool Aid and enjoy the view.

Anyone remember that a long time member of the Community used the phrase "Code Monkey"? It's been a few years but hearing this version I wish people would just first take a deep breath, count to ten and then focus on the things that really matter...

As a Fedorian I welcome everybody from Ubuntu who seek an alternative. Fedora is a free cutting edge distro. The good side: no ads and other commercial ties making *you* the product or that unity abomination. The downside: Fedora is void of any (potentially) patent encumbered or non-free software so you will need to make a bit of an effort to get all those codecs, flash and non-free apps etc installed on your shiny new Fedora powered box. It's worth it though. Even GNOME3 grows on you once you have slapped some sanity into it by installing a bunch of extensions. If you are not interested in Fedora, there are a ton of different distributions to choose from. Head over to distrowatch.com to get an idea how many there are.

Really De Icaza, posting as an AC? How's the funding going? Did Microsoft find you a new Baystar yet?

And why would that be? Seems all I hear from those Mono lovers is that those who are opposed to Mono and De Icaza's little ploy have no clue. Yet I am still waiting on what the right clue is. Why is there no patent threat in Mono? Why is it safe to use? Why will I never be sued by Microsoft when I deploy/sell Mono crap? Give me proof and nothing but proof. Thus far all I hear is a thundering silence.

De Icaza may have gotten that license and it seems to be all about Mono but if you read their plans then you can see that De Icaza, as one can expect from a good little Microsoft footsoldier, is moving towards closed, proprietary applications for iPhone and Android. With Microsoft already targeting Android phone vendors what do you think what will happen if vendors ship Mono based applications created with De Icaza's Trojan Horses or sell Mono based apps in their app stores? It's all about getting more Microsoft Intellectual Property on Android phones so Microsoft can continue & further expand their shake down or sue for (alleged) patent infringement. It's all about making sure that Microsoft can say to potential hardware partners: Android is *not* free, there is a monetary (legal/IP) cost attached and this is why we are cheaper. Microsoft provides the bullets (via Attachmate this time) and De Icaza as usual bends over for Microsoft and does as he is told. This announcement should be a wake up call to the entire Android Community that Microsoft is trying very hard to make everybody who's doing anything with Android bleed till they drop dead.

I don't know how many here fly an average of 200 times a year but that is a lot. Having flown for decades my record was 200+ European flights and about 50 (twice a week) flights from Amsterdam to the US. People I met with a lot actually thought that I lived there where "there" was e.g. London, Paris, New York etc. At some point you become the guy Up In The Air so I knew it was time to get out. That and the jet lag that never left. He did it for 29 years. That's pretty amazing.

This "oopsie" is just a small fail in a long history of epic fails. In the last 100 years the Dutch socialists have destroyed education and healthcare, have initiated massive blue collar immigration without thinking one second of the consequences if you don't do anything about integration resulting, besides increased crime, in considerable emigration of highly educated white collar knowledge workers. Furthermore Dutch socialists have subsidized ridiculous initiatives with ridiculous amounts of taxpayer money as long as it furthered their socialist cause and retained or expanded votes, spent money like there was no tomorrow (thanks for the staggering debt...) and generally lined their own pockets forcefully paid for by hard working people with a real job. The fact that politicians know next to nothing about the in-ter-nets is shameful and labor should have consulted with experts on the subject before casting their vote and making their even more stupid mistake of voting for the wrong bill. Thank $deity these socialist idiots lost the elections and are no longer part of the government. As usual the mess the Dutch socialists left can now be cleaned up by the new centre-right government which has to come up with $12 billion worth of spending cuts (about 2% of estimated 2011 GNP). This was Dutch Rant radio. Thanks for listening & have a great day!

Technology is not the issue: get your favorite OS instance from your favorite cloud provider/hoster or whatever, setup ssh and openvpn. Part 1 done. Now hop on irc.freenode.net to #asterisk or #freeswitch and ask around for a provider that offers encrypted SIP calls using TLS/SRTP or even ZRTP using non standard ports (like 80, 443, 25 etc.). If your new overlords don't block ports perhaps Skype works too. Use creditcard to throw some cash at the service, configure phone. Part 2 done.

Bottom line is that when you are in a country with scary overlords with many scare drones who like to see you in a scary basement with scary tools you want to keep your head down, do the work, grab the pot of gold (I hope) and get the hell out. If you are from the US be prepared for some serious negative sentiment towards you and the US in general. Do not comment on anything political ever. Do not comment on the pothole in the street, the food, the music, do not comment on girls/women ever. Basically do not comment on anything. Just smile, shut up, respectfully say you have work to do and back out of the discussion as fast as you can. And remember, your biggest "friend" is probably the guy that reports about you every night and gives the other scary drones the intel based on which they might decide to drag you into one of their basements. Do not confide in any person. Oh and just because some other expats say there's no problem with having a few alcoholic beverages at home does not mean that it's save for you. Just imagine the scary basement with the scary tools before you do something that is totally normal in the US but might be or is conceived as insulting and illegal in your nice new restrictive country.

I hope it's worth it.

It's nice to see that even /. will not clearly specify that this is a Microsoft Windows-only problem. The Microsoft PR drones have been "generalizing" and "de-Windowfying" the trojan/virus/malware problem for a while now. And quite successful it seems when even /. serves its articles the way Microsoft's PR drones like to see them. If you read the first sentence then it is basically unclear, to the untrained, inexperienced eyes of this world, that this is not a problem for all Operating Systems and platforms but unique to one particular vendor. Time to give the Microsoft PR drones more work and put the blame were it belongs.