ls.net

Beta testing in the southern hemisphere is underway.

"You have zero privacy anyway," Sun Microsystems' CEO Scott McNealy said last year (1999). "Get over it."

It is high time for misdemeanors. If you are not annoyed by this administrations assault on privacy, sip your Kool-Aid and go back to sleep. If, on the other hand you are as disappointed as I am, we have work to do. https://ssd.eff.org/ is a good place to start. I have resources to lend, public Internet facing bandwidth and servers.

We can at least kick sand in their eyes.

Read this book yesterday in a single sitting, the first since Voltaire's Candide.

http://zelalemkibret.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/the-alchemist.pdf and many others.

Not profound, not literary, just compelling.

Google started its Gmail service in 2006 at San Jose City College - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/big-mail-on-campus.html. LSNet signed up immediately. I had been spending about 4 hours a day battling spam and losing.

Over the years, we routinely set up free Google Apps on new domains. Not sure how many but perhaps 100 or so. I went to set one up today and wound up with a 30 day trial. The domain belongs to a non-profit so there is http://www.google.com/nonprofits/.

I've been watching ARM developments - http://armdevices.net/ - for a year or so and the time has come to stick more than a toe - cmp741e http://www.craigelectronics.com/site/pdetails.php?id=414 - into the water. The wandboard Quad ($129) - http://www.wandboard.org/ - may have enough power to run a LAMP - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle) - system. You will need a few extras:

Windows XP is approaching "End of Support". http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-support-help. Support for Internet Explorer ended with IE8. Google Apps and JQuery 2,0 no longer work with IE8 Most users have already installed Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox but there are sites which depend on "OldIE". That means you need two rendering engines.

The latest version of Ubuntu was released on Thursday. I've upgraded the living room media machine and my desktop. Both upgrades went without incident. The Unity interface seems much improved and overall the machine is faster. I'm using LXDE on my desktop I cannot discern a difference in performance. Although I still find the simian nature of Unity repelling, I am getting used to "point and grunt". I picked up a couple of new-old Fujitsu tablets and maybe I can complete the orientation.

I have enabled the feature for the domain ls.net and added it to my account. It appears to be optional. I am barely beginning to understand the ramifications so it will be better to ask Google than me. Of course, if disaster strikes, I will try to help. Changing computers or multiple computers looks like the biggest hassle.

I do know of several cases of hacked passwords so password theft is not a remote possibility. I know one of my passwords has been compromised numerous times but I do not use it on accounts of consequence.

LSNet would like to apologize for today's internet outage. ComCast Cable, our Internet Provider, had outages in the area throughout most of the day.