I want to use Colloquy over an SSH socks proxy. (OpenSSH's client can provide a SOCKS4 proxy with the -D option). Mozilla and other programs can already use the proxy without trouble when configured to do so in their own prefs.

Colloquy wants me to enter the socks proxy into my system-wide preferences, instead of in it's own settings. Ok. This works. Colloquy will now use the system-specified SOCKS proxy on connections that I tell it to, and not use it on others. Cool.

The problem is this: if the SOCKS option is checked in system preferences, Safari can't not use it. And Safari seems to only speak SOCKS5. And OpenSSH only speaks SOCKS4. I don't really need Safari to browse through the proxy. But if I have the proxy enabled, Safari can't browse at all, due to it's apparent incompatibility with SOCKS4.

My objective here is to get Colloquy working over the proxy, and Safari working at all, simultaneously. Any suggestions?

mmmmm. My mozilla.org software was a bit out of date.

wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/0.3/thunderbird-0.3-macosx.dmg.gz http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firebird/releases/0.7/MozillaFirebird-0.7-mac.dmg.gz http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.5/mozilla-mac-MachO-1.5.dmg.gz http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/camino/releases/Camino-0.7.dmg.gz

(anyone reading have opinions of thunderbird yet? I'm hoping Apple Mail.app will improve lots in panther... perhaps i'll try this out for a few days while I wait though.)

I haven't used a p2p net in quite some time, and I needed to get a song this morning. So I installed gtk-gnutella on my debian box, and am now happily running it over X forwarding to my mac. I have pretty fast DSL, and a lot of music, so I opened a port on my firewall and configured gtk-gnutella to be an "ultra peer", whatever that means. My intent is to share some files while I'm downloading. For some reason, try as I might, I can't seem to do that. I've downloaded about a hundred files now, at least 10 of which are good (heh), but my upload count is still zero. I have 25gb shared, but nobody is downloading. I'm pretty sure something is misconfigured on my end, but I don't know what. Suggestions?

Also, what are some other good p2p (gnutella or other) clients for mac or linux? On the rare occasions that I use em, I usually use gtk-gnutella or Xnap, but I'd like to find something better.

Any mac people still read this journal? I've got a question maybe someone can help me with...

Lets say I'm using the built-in AES disk images, from DiskCopy.app. I use a disk image that is located on a remote machine, over some sort of file sharing protocol like AFP or NFS. I can now put things on this encrypted volume, and the encryption is all done locally (and the .dmg file goes over the network). All good so far.
So, my question is, how do I rsync onto this? Normally, when I rsync onto a remote machine, I use -e ssh, which starts an rsync process on each side. As long as the source or dest is an encrypted volume, done locally, I can't see how to rsync properly (a normal rsync command will take longer than copying, as it would need to read all of each file over the network multiple times, right?).

I don't think this is possible, but I wanted to pose the question anyway just to see if anyone had ideas. The paramaters don't need to be apple disk images and rsync, I suppose - other suggestions for incremental transfer to remote encrypted storage, while doing all the encryption locally, would also be welcomed.

Speakeasy.net, the ISP recently referred to as the "world's greatest ISP" on the front of slashdot, is trying to scam people. The new NetShare plan sounds pretty good, from the available information on their public site. Speakeasy has long encouraged people to run free wireless APs, and it shouldn't be surprising that some people are using wireless technology to share DSL costs with their neighbors (I am). So, it appears, this new NetShare plan provides an easy way to have my "customers" (really just one neighbor in my case) pay speakeasy directly. And, as a bonus, they'll get an email account and some limited tech support from them. Sounds good.

After reading the /. story, I wanted to find out more. The FAQ on speakeasy's website has some information, but doesn't say anything specific about pricing. It wants you to login for the full story. At first, the login page was dumping me to a 404. Now, at some point in the last hour, it was fixed. Instead of a login page, NetShare Admin is now listed as an option under Add/Remove Services. So I clicked it.

I guess I may as well just get to the fucking point already. Here is a screenshot of the signup screen, inside the MySpeakeasy members area.

Only half of what your neighbor pays speakeasy gets credited to your account. You can choose to charge people anywhere from $20 to $100 dollars, per month, and you get 50% of that credited to your bill. In my case, our $100/mo dsl bill is currently being split between 5 different people, including our neighbor, so everybody is paying $20. And if I were to switch my neighbor over to the NetShare plan (instead of having him pay me cash, like he does now) I'd be out $10 per month (while he'd be paying the same ammount).

"Alright," some might say, "then just don't use it". Well, that would now make me a violator. Buried in the FAQ, under what is surely the wrong question, lays this very uncool, very un-greatest-isp-in-the-world, answer:

• I don't use WiFi but still want to share my connection (Ethernet, carrier pigeons, free-space optics, whatever). What's your policy?
• • Speakeasy believes that shared wireless networks are in keeping with our core values of disseminating knowledge, access to information and fostering community, provided this usage does not have an adverse impact on the services of other customers, does not involve any illegal activity and is not otherwise in violation of any aspect of our existing Terms Of Service . Please remember that the Speakeasy account-holder is responsible for all activity originating from their DSL line, even if it is the result of other users on a shared wireless connection.

    You may use either wired or wireless networks to share your connection, under the NetShare terms of use. Use of NetShare is mandatory if broadband circuit is residential and you intend to collect fees from third parties accessing your network.

(emphasis mine)

So, if I'm understanding all this right, I now have the choice of paying $10 more per month, or violating their TOS. But what even defines third parties? Should I be charging my 3 housemates as NetShare customers, too? I mean, I am collecting fees from them, after all.

This is all bullshit! I was expecting to find we could all pay less from using this so called "revolutionary new service". What the fuck, Speakeasy?!

As they say on IRC: pls fx, kthx.

I saw a billboard for applemusic.com in Emeryville yesterday. (Didn't they agree not to ever do that, back when Apple Records sued them?)
Whatever.

So today I decided to check out the iTunes music store, which I haven't done since my initial look the day it opened. I typed in the same search term I did then - Radiohead - and got zero results. Thats odd, because the day they opened, they had all but one track of OK Computer. And now theres nothing. Why would they do this? Are there other examples of tracks which were available and are now gone? I thought Steve said they were trying to expand their library, encoding and adding new material all the time. So why remove tracks? I guess we could speculate. Maybe they're paying royalties just to list the songs, and don't want waste money listing tracks that aren't selling? Or maybe a record company changed their mind about the whole thing? Or maybe it's just a glitch, and the tracks will return soon?

Regardless of why Radiohead is gone now, the question "why was there a single track missing from the album in the first place" still stands. They had every track of OK Computer except for track three, Subterranean Homesick Alien . Again, speculation: Did they not want to sell the album for $9.99, so they made it unavailable as a full album purchase? Maybe it was cheaper to license it as a partial album?
But how was it decided which track to cut? (<fiess>It was a really good track!</fiess>)

I guess I'm just rambling now. I haven't bought anything from the store, and I don't intend to, because I prefer unrestricted audio formats over insulting-to-our-intelligence DRM formats. But somehow, as an Apple user, Radiohead fan, and mp3 archivist, I'm really curious about this stuff. If you read this far, feel free to speculate further in the comments :)

Do you know your war profiteers? No? Maybe a card deck will help.

Mike Hawash has finally been charged, with "conspiracy to levy war against the United States, conspiracy to provide material support to al Qaeda and conspiracy to contribute services to al Qaeda and the Taliban". Reuters has an initial story here, and another one here (compare and contrast...). Mike's Supporters are still behind him, and say that "Mike's friends and those who know him think the idea that Mike would have fought for the Taliban or traveled to Afghanistan is absurd. Mike's concerns were for his family in America, his family in Palestine, and for his faith.". It's interesting that Mike's letter from prison was removed from his site a few days ago, and is now only available in the google cache (and the personal cache of anyone with the wget -U " " -pk command).

Entertaining Operation Iraqi Liberation anagrams:

• Coalition: Oil Action
• Coalition Forces: Antics of Oil CEO
• Operation Iraqi Freedom: Iraq, Ore, Neo Media Profit

(credit where due, I just thought of the last one)
 
While we're playing word games, I'd like to remind everyone of the coolest palindrome since Age, irony, Noriega:

Satan oscillate my metallic sonatas

Slashdot almost lets you edit other people's journals! (It doesn't let you save them, but I don't think you should even be able to get far enough to try)

(note: users who aren't logged in won't get it when they click that link)

Safari v73, or "beta 2", is working quite well. The cmd-W bug that plagued me in v62 (it usually closes tabs, but sometimes closed the whole window) is fixed. Tabs look a bit better. The rendering engine has all the new fixes Hyatt has been talking about. Tabs can extend off the edge when you get too many. It could just be my imagination, but I think it's faster, too.

Bad news: It keeps asking for my keychain password. I don't know why. Everytime it launches, and sometimes on certain sites (not sites I have ever typed or stored a password for), I get the Unlock Keychain password prompt. So far I've just clicked cancel everytime. Thats the only quirk I've found so far. Granted, I've only been using it for about 40 minutes, but still...

I'm really glad to be running an officially released beta again.
Didn't feel right submitting bugs from the leaked one, and I couldn't very well go back to using v60 without tabs...

Another big thing thats bugging me though:
Proxy Support? I've never been able to get any version of Safari or Chimera/Camino to use my ssh socks proxy. The only Mac browser that will use the socks proxy, as far as I can tell, is Mozilla.

Camino does connect to the proxy, but then fails (so when there is a socks proxy in network settings, camino can't load anything at all). I can see in the ssh -v output that it's made a connection to the proxy port, but it never gets as far as sending the hostname it wants to connect to. (When mozilla connects, the ssh -v output shows a connection, followed by the hostname and port number mozilla wants to connect to). The -v output of a attempted camino connection looks exactly the same as if I telnet to localhost on the proxy port, and then close the connection. (Almost as if camino is trying to talk something other than SOCKS4 to the port...)

IIRC, old versions of Safari behaved the same way as Camino, connecting to the proxy, but never getting through to the remote site. The v73 Safari I'm running now doesn't even connect to the proxy at all; when there's a SOCKS proxy set in Network Preferences, Safari just continues to browse directly to the web. I noticed that Network Prefs lets you enter different proxy info for different network interfaces, and it dawned on me that maybe programs just ask "whats the proxy" and don't get it from the right interface. So I configured the socks proxy settings again, on every interface, but that still didn't do it. Mozilla, of course, doesn't use the system proxy prefs, so I just enter the proxy in the application's prefs and it works.

For what it's worth, I'm creating my proxy with this command:

ssh user@host -v -D 8080 -C

...and checking if a browser is browsing through it by loading this page. I think having proxy settings be system-wide is really annoying. I wish each browser could be configured to use a proxy on an individual basis, like Mozilla, and I wish it would actually work.

According to an article at Wininformant.com, Microsoft has asked a company called InterVideo to port WMA support to Linux. "We believe most of the major consumer electronics companies are looking at the Linux platform as a stable, low-cost solution for multimedia functionality," said Steve Ro, InterVideo's CEO. They aren't porting Windows Media Player, however, just bringing support for the format to embedded linux customers (read: PVR makers), "at low licensing costs". (So buckle your seatbelts, kids, cause linux warez are just around the corner :) It's nice to see MS finally acknowledging that GNU/Linux isn't going away anytime soon, and that a consumer-targeted media format really does need to be playable on it.

Update: jeffy124 pointed out that my submission wasn't accepted because it was already posted. I guess I missed some slashdot that day. But, really, when did /. start rejecting submissions just for being dupes? Shouldn't that have made it more likely to get posted?

RMS would give companies tight control over the permissions that apply to their business documents, said Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Security Business Unit.
...
Using RMS, a business could restrict access by user, limit or time-out user access, or prevent the copying and pasting of specific bits of information. Businesses also could prevent important e-mails from being forwarded to nonapproved recipients, such as reporters or competitors.

Microsoft's latest futile attempt at using software to restict content is actually called 'Rights Management Services', or RMS , for short.

Whoever named that one sure had a sense of humor ;)

On the subject of the Good Saint IGNUcius, I actually had the privilege of meeting him in person recently! I can now honestly say that I've been personally and publicly corrected by RMS himself about Linux actually being called GNU/Linux. "There's a common misconception that there is such an operating system as Linux," he calmly explained. I smiled, some other audience members laughed, but Richard kept a straight face throughout. "It's not just about giving credit," he insists. I unfortunately didn't get to hear him sing [mp3 mirror], though. It's a shame, too, as I really would have enjoyed a musical performance.

He did loose his cool a bit later on in a hallway; he was heard yelling at someone [link] who had aparently misused the term "Open Source" in conversation. He says it hurts the movement to misuse terms like that. I see his point, but I don't think calling not-open-enough-for-rms projects open source could ever be nearly as harmful as screaming and yelling like a small child about the issue, in public.

I did learn a new term: Source Visible software. Thats what he called software such as pgp.com's offerings, that let you review the code but not under a Free licensee. I think everybody should just start using this term in place of open source in situations where they're not sure, just to, you know, avoid any potential harm they might inadvertently do, to the movement.

Try to keep in mind, when you hear warmongers endorse war as a viable option for solving a problem, that this is what they're talking about.

4/9 Update: I meant to enable comments on this when I posted it. They're enabled now. Since this link was really posted for certain warmongers on my friends list here at slashdot, i really did want to hear what you all had to say about it.

Wow. No slashdot april fools stories on March 31st this year, imagine that. The guys at grsecurity are on the ball though, announcing that they've been shutdown by AOLTW for patent reasons, and advising all mirrors to remove grsec from distribution. A friend of mine just called me up and was really upset about this; I didn't realize the date until I got off the phone. I'm not sure if he was passing the joke on to me, or if he was fooled himself...