Technocracy of War, Part 6

Posted on January 9, 2012 by ehurst

The one thing Thad liked most was how they had managed to port almost every GUI application over to a TUI. Thus, while losing some of the buttons and toolbars, the backend was the same for web browser, office suite, text editor, integrated system utilities — everything he needed with far fewer distractions. Best of all, it was lightening fast on older hardware.
Excerpt from the Bread OS System Administrator’s Guide:

Bread OS is actually the underlying system, and Butter is the graphical user interface (GUI). Butter is little more than an advanced framebuffer display. For graphical and video work, choose some other operating system, as Butter engages very little of the 3D acceleration capabilities on most graphics chipsets. The purpose is to enable the use of low cost generic hardware.
There is little advantage in having a GUI on most server configurations. For this reason, the Toast server OS defaults to a Textual User Interface (TUI) called Jam. Jam will can run at the default pixel resolution for almost every chipset and screen display combination. It is fully mouseable, and works pretty much the same as a GUI. Yes, you can have your Bread or Toast with either Butter or Jam, or both.

************
During his rather short stay in prison, Pete Jimmerson lost track of his nemesis. Upon release, he moved all his hardware to collocate with the server farm Brandon purchased from a failing ISP. This became the location of his physical office, too. He left two machines as before, one each NetBSD and CentOS, as bait. The other two were converted to Toast, but kept their old naming scheme for DNS.
Eventually the shadowy cracker found him again. It was about the time he was promoted to project manager, working directly with Brandon on a daily basis. Jennifer Runston retired and tapped him as her replacement. His passionate drive for Bread OS was a symptom of his still festering resentment. While Brandon mentioned he saw a haunting shadow in Pete’s eyes, he was satisfied the latter did not let it interfere with his loyalty. The results were better than even Brandon had envisioned, and Peter was frankly excited at the prospect of facing his enemy with much better weapons.
Pete had coded his two Toast servers to identify themselves, along with the standard networking ID protocols, simply as “I’m Toast!” Because access from outside the machine was based on explicit white listing, any unauthorized connection attempt would add to the end of any error codes: “No crackers, thank you. I like my Toast!” Aside from several notices in his logs of deflected attempts, the cracker seemed to have given up rather quickly on those two boxes.
Once the OS reached the release stage, Pete had more time for searching the old traces, but not much. He and Brandon made the trade show circuit, something Pete dreaded. His predecessor, even with her silver hair, was the next thing to a geek’s showgirl, quite charming. Peter was almost coherent in front of a live audience, though he did okay just chatting in the booth.
Every time they came back, his logs were silent for just awhile. He had almost given up when his firewall logs showed what he had hoped, that the cracker couldn’t get into his Toast boxes. Taking the bait with the other two, Pete offered the same resistance he had in the past, in cold calculation of pretending to have learned nothing. Quite the contrary, he had learned far more than any college courses could teach him during the forced period of concentration, earning respect and trust from the project leadership from his workstation in the prison. When in the office, he kept the same schedule he had then, meaning he paid no attention to meat space beyond the necessities of his job and his flesh.
This time the cracker was working on totally different ends. While still taunting Pete as before, including obscene personal references even to his prison stay, there was oddly no mention of the Bread Project. The intruder was obviously setting up a different operation than the petty crimes of the past. Pete’s logs showed the cracker always waited until his machines were idle. There would be quick penetrations through some means Pete did not yet understand, some code copied in, compiled, tested in some way, copied out, then deleted from his drive. It was all assembler code, and only once did Peter catch a glimpse, and did a quick screen capture before it was already done and gone. So far as he could tell from the few lines of code, it had something to do with manipulating the file system. Was that how his enemy kept getting in, a flaw in the file system calls or driver? Pete guessed this was something rather big and nasty brewing.
While the cracker left his taunting messages recorded in the logs as kernel message traffic, they also left just enough traces for Peter to discover at least one thing he expected: The traffic was coming through Tor. While he knew some people who might help him just a little with that, he decided he might get better results through one of the users. He had kept Thad Eyrie at arm’s length until now, but decided it was time to maybe make a deal.

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Taming the Beast: CentOS 6.2 and Inspiron 1525 Laptop

Posted on January 8, 2012 by ehurst

We all know Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the basis for both CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL). The differences are largely cosmetic from the user’s point of view, in which the clones are legally required to change only the artwork and remove the Red Hat logos. There are differences in how each clone project goes about building the product from common sources, but I doubt you’ll find any difference in how they behave. Everything I’ve written about RHEL and SL applies to CentOS. All I’m doing here is summing up the combined notes of how we get from putting in that install DVD to a usable system.

This is what I did installing CentOS 6.2 on a Dell Inspiron 1525.

1. Install options: I chose the minimal graphics driver, because this system has Intel graphics. The Linux kernel used by Red Hat has a bug with some Intel graphics framebuffer hardware (intelfb). It’s easy to work around and fix it later. Most of the other options should be obvious. When in doubt, I typically take the defaults offered.

2. However, I don’t like dual booting two or more OSes, so I chose to “Use all space” for the disk options. When it came up, I chose the standard “Desktop” profile without trying to adjust the package selection.

3. When the installation is finished, it will kick out the DVD and wait for you to press “Reboot.” In the post-install configuration, you should simply pay attention to the options and choose what fits your needs. For example, I chose to use NTP for the system clock, and made sure to un-check the UTC box in the lower left corner.

4. After logging in, I immediately click on the Networking icon on the upper right toolbar and set up the option to connect automatically. Then I open the Terminal under Applications > System Tools, and “su” to root. This is the time to fix the Intel driver issue. I also run:

yum update
yum groupinstall "Development tools"

Almost every time I update post-install, I receive a kernel update, so this is where I reboot.

5. Upon logging in again, I add a few select packages. You can do this through the System > Administration > Add/Remove Software application or from the commandline as root:

yum install xterm bitmap-fixed-fonts aspell alacarte gnome-games gnome-games-extra gimp units vim-X11 elinks dos2unix unix2dos

The first two items after “install” go together. In particular, you might want alacarte, which allows the user to edit the GNOME menu system. GNOME Games comes in two packages. I use GIMP from time to time, and whomever packages Elinks has recently begun tracking the original project itself; good text browser but requires a bit of work getting the options as you might like them. Units is a CLI conversion calculator between various types of measures, with a long list of metric, English, etc., units. Remember to hit CTRL-C when you are done to kill it. The rest you can figure out for yourself if you need them. Also, be aware you’ll need to chase down Aspell’s English language package on your own. I have no idea why it’s not in RHEL’s package repositories, but I built it from SRPM, pulled from Fedora 13’s repositories.

6. This is the time to do the first half of font fixing. After adding my favorite TTFs to my ~/.fonts folder (you’ll likely have to create it), then as root, fix the fonts by changing the settings for the whole system. Finally, I rebuild the Freetype libraries. That means chasing down the SRPM, and both SL and CentOS simply point you to the upstream RHEL ones. However, I’ve changed a few details from my previous tutorial: I use Yum —

yum localinstall nogpgcheck freetype-2.3.11-6.el6.8.i686 freetype-devel-2.3.11-6.el6.8.i686

Logout, hit CTRL-BKSP and restart the X server with the new Freetype libs. Fonts will look much, much better. Now’s the time to adjust the appearance of your desktop and set your preferred default fonts. I’ve always imported the Dirty-Ice GTK2 look in the process. You can probably find a copy using your favorite search engine.

7. Next comes the JDK replacement with Oracle’s latest 1.6 series (1.7 fails with OpenOffice and LibreOffice), because it’s much faster than the bundled OpenJDK package. I also grab the latest fuse-ntfs-3g from RepoForge. That would be the one for “el6” in this case.
8. After testing one more time to be sure, I cannot recommend Dag Wieers’ RepoForge because too many of the packages are way out of date, and they still exclude Mikmod, which I use. So if you want full multimedia and other advanced third party goodies, the best remains ATrpms. However, compared to my original tutorial, I typically leave off the Mplayer and extra codecs until I run into something which simply won’t work after adding all the extra goodies for Gstreamer. However, nothing in Linux land compares to using FFmpeg for converting audio and video files.

9. However, for Broadcom wifi, I don’t trust ATrpms to keep up when the kernel gets upgraded. It’s best to simply grab the zipped driver package direct from Broadcom. The instructions bundled in the driver are pretty good, but the point is whenever the kernel is upgraded, you simply rebuild at your convenience and re-install the module. Check the link periodically to see if they have updated to a later version; the latest is from October last year.

10. I prefer the latest versions of Joe’s editor and Lynx web browser. You can chase them down from the latest Fedora SRPMs; they’ve always built fine with RPMbuild. As of this writing, they can be found here. As time goes on, you can go there, jump up the “Parent Directory” links a couple of layers and back down into later releases of Fedora SRPMs. I also do the same with Alpine because I really prefer doing email from the commandline. You can learn how to configure Alpine here.

10. The last two items is adding Bleachbit and whatever browsers you might like. I seldom use Firefox for anything these days, but prefer Chrome and Opera. You can find them if you like them.
11. I also fix Vim. For some strange reason, on CentOS Vim also does not honor my textwidth setting unless I put that on its own set line in my ~/.vimrc and ~/.gvimrc both.

12. The last thing I do is turn off a few services I know I won’t use on my laptop:

bluetooth
firstboot
mdmonitor
netfs
nfs
nfslock
sshd

You’ll find this in the menu under System > Administration > Services. Make sure the items you don’t need have a red dot to the left of them. Be very careful! You could easily cripple your system by accident by turning off something basic and essential, such as the keyboard driver.

At some point you may be requested to put in some password for GNOME Keyring. It’s just your login password, so don’t panic.

Enjoy!

Update: Recent issue with updating ffmpeg from ATrpms. When you try to update via Yum, or via the Update Manager (that bright orange icon in the notification area), you’ll get an error something like this:

Error: Package: libavcodec53-0.10-54.el6.i686 (atrpms)
Requires: libvpx.so.1()
You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

Here is the simplest and quickest solution; just copy and paste as a single line into any terminal window:

yum update libvpx - --enablerepo=atrpms-testing --disableplugin=*

Yes, this will change one of the core libraries from the upstream provider (RHEL). It shouldn’t break anything, but it could. You be the judge; it’s part of the risk of using any external Yum repo.

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Technocracy of War, Part 5

Posted on January 8, 2012 by ehurst

For most of that week, Thad poked and prodded Bread OS. There was in the documentation a notice more popular applications would be ported eventually, but the basic set of workstation programs was almost complete. The desktop display was not really that different from old Windows 98, quite plain and simple. There were no toys, just tools most people used for office type work, plus a terminal emulator with many of the same tools you would expect for Unix. In other words, perfect.
He was a little angry with himself for not saving the links from the Electronic Runestones blog, but was glad to find a link to the author. It turned out the title was a play on the her name: Jennifer Runston. The name sounded familiar. He compose an email describing the nature of his project and what he discovered. He was hoping for a few more details so he could write a review. A few minutes after he sent it, the associations for her name finally surfaced in his mind.
Jennifer Runston was the belle of the ball for the older generation, a rare glamorous geek girl. It didn’t matter whom or what she represented at the various technology trade shows, with Jennifer on your PR team you never needed to hire booth babes. Best of all, she could write elegant code herself, so she could chatter with anyone. He never had a chance to make those shows while he was in the Air Force, and when he got out, things had changed. She got married, had a couple of kids and faded into the background. Thad remembered she was a few years older than he, so that meant she had to be over 60 now.
Later that day he got a reply. She thanked him for identifying another clean up task for her retirement. Retirement? She no longer worked for Brandon Breeze — another name he seemed to recall — and had been succeeded by a Peter Jimmerson. She had no comment on Bread OS, but would try to put him in touch with someone on the project. She warned him they had no interest in typical promotions, but were planning to market this in the corporate back channels. She didn’t say, but he assumed this had to do with avoiding public fights with some of the established corporate software companies.
After thinking it over, he decided it would be worth it simply to beg for a chance to keep using it himself. But regardless of their plans to slip in the backdoor of small business and local government agencies, he knew at least one old friend would really want to hear about this — Mantis Akibe.
Mantis was an old buddy from Air Force Basic Training. Thad was already in his mid-twenties, and Manny was just a kid out of high school. He came from a middle class black family, the fifth son who decided not to be a doctor or lawyer. They made fast friends during the training cycle, both having an interest in computers. After tech school, the natural course of things separated them, but they had remained in touch. Mantis completed his first term of service and switched to the Army on his next enlistment. When Thad decided he’d had enough after fifteen years, Mantis had just been promoted to Warrant Officer and was working in information management. He had picked up his degree while in uniform.
Thad knew Mantis was also working with the NSA. He was hardly permitted to discuss things, but had more than once offered Thad what amounted to a warning their communications would always be monitored. Thad was counting on that when he sent off an email describing Bread OS and how it seemed to address their shared frustrations with years of chasing Open Source.
From the Bread Project, Thad received permission to keep the system updated and to read, but not participate in, the email discussion lists. That was more than he had been hoping, so he gladly accepted their requirement he not promote the project in the typical advocacy-fanboy fashion. He did warn them he would be sharing with military technicians, to which they seemed indifferent. Over the next year, Thad became one of a handful of outsiders who actually qualified as a serious power user of Bread OS. He even played with Toast a good bit, and shared notes with his friend, Mantis, who seemed genuinely interested.

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Technocracy of War, Part 4

Posted on January 7, 2012 by ehurst

She waited patiently, her paws crossed as she lay in the small patch of sun available in the fenced yard. Once each week, he walked past on the newly paved street which had replaced the gravel. In her mind, the road served the single purpose of bringing this beloved stranger into her utterly boring life. Sure enough, at roughly the same time as always, she spied a lone pedestrian in a neighborhood which saw precious few people walking anywhere outside their own yards.
His fast stride carried him to her. For just a few moments, she was fully alive, as he stroked her through the fence, then tossed the ball she had carefully dropped between the wrought iron bars. She chased, caught it, and turned to see him receding down the street again. She would wait another week for this golden moment.
On today’s long walk, the man debated in his mind which operating system he hated most. He spent much of his working hours working with computers. There was none he liked, only a few he could tolerate, and most he simply despised. The corporate products were often closer to what he wanted in general terms of usability, but always riddled with security holes. The Open Source stuff was always more secure, but also always a patchwork of multiple projects. Most ran forward at breakneck pace in development, always new and shiny, always broken in some new way. Every day another project folded, and three others sprang up to grab the limelight. It was utterly chaotic, and a wonder anything worked at all.
He loved BSD for it’s simplicity and stability, but it was one of the worst about rolling heedlessly over user complaints. You were lucky if you ever got a curt, “Code it yourself.” That was the Open Source developer’s excuse for ignoring anything he or she found boring. But he typically ended up running some clone of Red Hat simply because it didn’t change dramatically, nor was it dropped from support, for pretty much the life of the hardware on which it ran. It was worth it compiling his own extras from source, despite the cascading dependencies on some items.
Thaddeus Eyrie was just your average aging ghost writer. He loved writing, but had gotten rather tired of the massive job of correcting some of the increasingly imbecilic prose, nowadays the worst there could be outside of an urban middle school. Lately had taken fewer jobs, and spent more time fooling with the operating systems and software with which he did his writing. Not that it mattered, since his veterans’ pension ensured he wouldn’t starve.
But Thad was just so tired of the constant changes in both the commercial closed source world, and the even greater changes in Open Source. He would have gladly stayed with the the likes of Debian Etch, but there was no hardware available for such ancient software. And the last time he actually liked FreeBSD was version 4.8. It was a good thing he didn’t take himself too seriously, or he would have stopped working altogether.
He was doing the background research for a stock article on businesses and Open Source software. The best comments and quotes came from obscure blogs and such, and he was chasing links late that night. At one point, he ran across one titled Electronic Rune Stones which mentioned a new project for business oriented software. The writer was being coy, apparently because it hadn’t been released at that point. So he went through the long process of scanning the archive on the blog. As always, some links were dead, but he found one tantalizing lead linked back to a previous post on the same blog. He got a “404 Page Not Found” error, and noticed the newer posts used a different format. He tried guessing what the older article might be, but still got the 404, even after trying various possibilities.
On his final incantation, he was distracted with a light flashing outside the window. Apparently his fingers slipped from the home keys, because he turned back just after he hit ENTER and saw the most hilarious typo. All he managed was a single bark of laughter, because he caught his breath when, instead of the same 404 error, he hit a page which was itself a simple instantaneous redirect.
His browser displayed a very plain FTP directory on some server which didn’t have a domain name, only the IP address. Among the interesting folders displayed there was the odd name “bread”. It opened for him, and he saw a collection of files. It took a moment for him to recognize he was in the top of an installation disk tree. Poking around a bit more, he realized it was an OS project of some kind, rather like FreeBSD in layout, with some of the same names, but seemed incomplete.
With time to kill, he downloaded the whole tree to a fresh folder. It was just a bit larger than a typical CD, so he used a DVD. Turning to the one machine not already running something, it was one he picked up at some office supply auction. It was specced with about the most generic hardware possible, and he figured it offered the best chance to work. Upon rebooting with the DVD in the tray, he was treated to a an ASCII art logo announcing this was “Bread OS 1.” Then came a series of text screens with one script handing off another. He took the default for what was called a “standard workstation.”
It was the final screen of text above the “commit” button that caught his attention. In essence, it warned him the installer would give him a very generic micro kernel and just precisely those driver modules which matched his hardware. One option was to allow the machine to then rebuild itself on the first reboot. A highly scripted process would recompile and optimize all the libraries, then create a macrokernel for only the hardware on his system, plus the bare necessity of function calls needed for common software used on a standard model workstation for most offices. It would periodically check for changes in the code based and rerun this process as needed. There was a warning the machine could not access any networking interfaces while the system files were open to rewrite. The computer would reboot and mount the system files read only.
The other option was to use the system immediately, and it would simply run the rebuild during idle time, mostly overnight. In two or three days of typical use patterns, it would be finished, and demand the user allow it to go into rewrite mode, then reboot.
Leaning back with a smile, he dared to hope. If this thing would actually run and do anything useful, it was the holy grail of ordinary computer users long frustrated with Open Source development which made the developers utterly unaccountable demigods. Yet it was Open Source, ostensibly trustworthy, and if it worked, exceptionally secure in basic concept.
He could afford to wait. He chose the option to rebuild immediately. Sleep came easy that night.

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CentOS 6.2 Laptop: Changes

Posted on January 6, 2012 by ehurst

The Latitude will not be available. I’ll be testing CentOS on my Inspiron 1525. I am downloading via Bittorrent as I type this (and sampling the experience of dialup speeds for my browser in the process). Opera’s built-in torrent handler is pretty cool.
Review of procedures, etc., in a few days.

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Technocracy of War, Part 3

Posted on January 6, 2012 by ehurst

They had moved Pete that very hour to temporary solitary confinement. While it meant missing breakfast, this was one of the saner things, keeping informants away from the general population. In two days, Peter found himself being marched down that long underground tunnel with the handful of stuff on him when he was arrested, along with some paperwork, in a clear plastic bag. The baggy orange coveralls had been replaced with a half-way comfortable denim outfit.
Thought they called it “the Farm” it was simply a nicer unit with private rooms, far less austere, behind the steel doors. Peter seldom saw the light of day, partly by choice. During his time in solitary, the burning necessity of catching his nemesis only grew. With it came a clarity of purpose and a fiery focus. He knew the best play was to hit the ground running.
After just a few hours of reviewing the Bread code base, he was quite surprised. While Brandon Breeze was no code jockey, he was quite the software architect. The same clean BSD code had been reworked with a less general purpose. Rather than some high performance secure server, it was narrowly structured with an obvious purpose. The first thing he did was port two drivers from his previous work in NetBSD. He submitted them as patches to existing modules, then begin digging deeper.
The work rules for the Bread Project within the prison system were pretty generous, and he was hardly the only hacker working all hours, barely stopping for basic bodily functions. But instead of wasting all his time on the IRC channel boasting of his “leetness,” Peter was actually comparing notes with all he had known. All the noise he had heard while still a devotee of NetBSD and OpenBSD was apparently just that — noise. Despite his reservations, he found himself liking the Bread Project.
So much so, he realized this could easily become the vehicle for tackling his enemy. Having discovered security holes which were slow being fixed in the other BSDs, he was gratified to find his security patches were rather quickly accepted for Bread, and his credibility as an honest contributor grew rapidly. Perhaps it was because there had not yet been a public release and things were still in rapid development, or perhaps he was a big fish in a small pond, but for whatever reason, he was being moved closer to the inner circle of project leadership. He was determined to take full advantage of this.
So he also ported several automated tools for security auditing the code. He wrote one himself, based on his experience with the cracker. The first day, it found five flawed sections of kernel code. Two were simply parsing errors, but three were apparently back doors. After running further tests, he submitted patches. Within hours he was flamed by some of the more long standing developers. He had expected this, and sent up the chain a coldly rational detailed analysis. Not once did he respond to any provocations and loaded terminology. Only much later did he learn a couple of developers had been kicked off the project that day, and sent back to the prison general population. Then again, he was hardly surprised; some of these folks really were crooked. He was hoping to put his nemesis there.
In just a couple of months after moving to minimum security and beginning to work earnestly on the Bread Project, Pete was surprised when he was called to the front desk because a visitor showed up to see him. He had warned his family and friends not to risk their own legal hassles by having much contact with him. There were too many horror stories. But this was someone he knew only by name and position: Jennifer Runston, the head security guru, and general operations manager, for Bread OS.
In the private interview room, he hardly dared to hope he wasn’t dreaming when she spoke the words “early release” in his ears. He knew Breeze had that kind of pull, but had completely forgotten himself in the single-minded task of building a weapon against his one enemy.

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The Technocracy of War: Part 2

Posted on January 5, 2012 by ehurst

For Peter Jimmerson, the war was over — for now. For the past two years he had been in a running battle with some cracker slipping into his servers. This was no simple showboating; the cracker was needling him personally, knew too much about Peter. While there may have been other targets, this scumbag had made his life miserable, laying traps, getting root on his boxes, hiding traces and mocking him at every turn. And while this cracker was using his servers for nefarious deeds, mostly attacking other servers, that seemed only an excuse to keep harassing Peter.
Pete was on the verge of finding out who the cracker was, having traced him back through multiple proxies to an IP address which registered just a few miles away. It never occurred to him to wonder what he would do if he finally identified the cracker; Peter was hardly the threatening thug, and was frankly frightened of guns. He had been a computer geek since he could remember, and was currently near the head of his class in Computer Science. The cracker seemed to know which machines Peter was using at the science lab, along with the two BSD boxes in his apartment.
But Peter’s roommate had insisted he just had to see the project in that other lab in College of Business. Pete knew the grad student lab techs there had been pirating the latest tablet software from Microsoft, selling it dirt cheap on campus and making quite a bundle. Normally he would not have come within line of sight on the building itself, but his buddy had gotten into serious hardware modifications and asked Pete for help prototyping it. So Pete was caught standing in the lab when campus security led the Feds in with guns drawn.
Of course the lab techs claimed Pete was in on it, along with his buddy. Fingering others for whom there was no evidence was the only way to get any credit for cooperating. Pete was never going to get his case heard; the War on Terror saw to that. Officially classed now as a terrorist, thanks to corporate lobbying, most legal protections were now a faded memory. His head was spinning during the first two weeks, trying to adjust to the new reality. Things he once knew as facts in the cloud of meat space data in the back of his mind were now front and center. He hated the distraction.
The only consolation was his servers were disconnected from the Net at the moment he was taken into custody. The burning necessity of finding the quickest exit showed him his real priorities. Catching the cracker was paramount. That meant qualifying for minimum security. The only path required he swallow his pride on the purity of his BSD boxes, and consider what previously was anathema — working with the Bread OS Project. He regarded Brandon Breeze as a corporate whore. While BSD licensing was wide open, he felt it was morally all but stealing code for a project which violated every principle of Open Source and BSD freedom.
But dealing with Breeze’s filthy project was better than staying in max security. His bunk mate was still bruised from a rape and beating by some thug and his gang on the next floor down. Peter was small enough and young enough to be both a perfect target for their abuse, but also able to slip out of every confrontation so far. Sooner or later, they would catch him. His cellmate was really unlucky, still waiting for a slot in the general labor pool for the prison industries. In this status, complaint about abuse from fellow inmates seldom brought relief.
Aside from having good employment prospects, the other necessity for moving to low security was dropping a dime on some associate or identifying some other terrorist. Having slept not a wink with the moaning from his cellmate, Pete had contemplated all this from every angle, and there was no other exit. So as the lights came up slowly in hall, the first guard he spotted making the cell check was the worst of the lot. Well, so much for poetic justice; this one was going to win the credit for another willing volunteer in one of the certified prison industry units. Guards got a bonus for inmates whom they persuaded to cooperate. The Bread Project was the only thing on the list he knew how to do. And the thug on the lower floor was easily a terrorist by any definition.
“Guard! I need to see the counselor, before breakfast if possible.” The counselors for the prison corporation were essentially recruiters for the very profitably prison industries, and worked long days.
It had occurred to Pete the guard was likely letting certain things happen to pressure him into taking just this step. Much as he despised this filth in guard’s uniform, he hated someone else even more. With a sneer the guard asked, “So Petey Boy! What’s up?”
Pete wore his best poker face, because all the passion and vitriol was aimed at some other target. “Two items: I want to sign on for an industry project and identify a terrorist.”
The guard stared at Pete for a few seconds, the smirk growing just a bit. “You’ve made me very happy, Petey Boy.” With that, the guard turned to carry out a new priority task.

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The Technocracy of War: Part 1 (fiction)

Posted on January 4, 2012 by ehurst

The screens displayed before him were somewhat more colorful than the rest of them, the hundreds throughout the building. Still, it was the same old Bread and Butter, and it was his bread-n-butter.
It was the reason he wore one of the few US Army CW5 rank insignias. All of the advantages, yet few of the hassles which came with wearing the military uniform, and everybody called him “Mister.” He thought back how it all came to be, and still had to pinch himself every now and then to make sure it was real.
Some of it he could only guess, because he didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. There were so many other players in the story.
************
Never the playboy, and just barely a billionaire, Brandon Breeze at least had a memorable name which really was his own. Born a nobody, he stumbled upon a series of ideas which carried him from YouTube sensation to Web Tycoon in just a few short years.
But his latest idea would almost surely lose him money. He was ready for that. He was tired, tired of estimating and chasing the front edge of the next fad. It was time to scratch that old itch, that one technology concept which, even if it succeeded, was unlikely to bring him any more fame and fortune.
Everyone was grabbing Linux for their devices, but it had always been a patchwork of things which didn’t always work out. Of course it ran on the devices, and millions of them running some version of it every day proved it was fine, but that “fine” was really “just okay.” It as okay for the broad consumer market on those devices, but seldom penetrated the corporate market. For all the fun which came with marketing hype, there was really only one operator in the Linux field actually making big money: Red Hat.
Governments and corporations were hardly nimble, and wanted today’s hot product with yesterday’s long term reliability. Since that was actually impossible, they often settled for whatever was reliable because, while flash sold to the consumers, it was long term stability which paid the bills in the office. So when Red Hat kept each release of their Enterprise Linux alive for a decade, it allowed the corporate and government bureaucracies to include it into their multi-year planning.
Thus, the one Linux product most hated by an Open Source developer crowd, a crowd infamous for their breakneck pace of rolling development, was the one which didn’t change much for a decade at a time and made all the money. Brandon Breeze wanted just a piece of that market, but with something more internally unified and consistent. He was willing to throw away most of his fortune to see if he could fork some of those brilliant Open Source ideas into an even more stable software project. He chose to build on the BSD base.
Thus was born Bread OS, earning him the hatred of seemingly every BSD aficionado. Sure, he could buy cooperation, but that wouldn’t do him much good in the long run. This thing had to draw its own constituency to survive in Open Source.
He thought it was his final piece of good luck when some government official, whom had encountered in the parks department as a volunteer when he was just a teenager, rose through a series of quick promotions to the head of the Private Prison Bureau. This was a new government office created to regulate what had been a spectacularly abusive system caught in a series of scandals. Just as more governments sought to contract out their prisons to private corporations, they were all caught making CIA torturers seem benign. So it was the chief regulator was his patron saint, because some of the newest crackdowns on “crime and terrorism” netted an awful lot of computer hackers.
For these, there was one chance for an early move to a low security, pre-release environment: They could volunteer to work on Brandon’s new project. It was completely up to Brandon whether the quality of their work earned them any extra points in the system. While there were a few who hated Brandon and his project enough to refuse involvement, there were always a fair number willing to compromise their purist sensibilities and add some code to the project. With exposure, it was only natural a few would become real fans and supporters. Not a few ended up working directly for Brandon at his company.
It all remained completely Open Source, but Brandon followed the Red Hat model of releasing the code, and under the much looser BSD license. He planned to charge for the pre-compiled package, pre-compiled updates, and most importantly, for actual support calls and contracts. The initial plan was to support and patch each release for ten years, and if there was enough demand, longer.
Going head-to-head with Red Hat was no small thing. It had already curried much favor in the various government agencies through cooperative projects. Still, he was confident there was a market for something which was somewhat more secure and stable, with a promise it would be less patchy and subject to the whims of external projects for the GUI and software. Some things could be ported and used as is within a bureaucratic environment, but too much of the wider array of stuff typically included in a Linux distribution tended to shift in bizarre directions for no apparent reason, not to mention with awful timing for other projects depending on it.
At some point Brandon’s project naturally divided into two streams. The basic code base derived from BSD was still called Bread, but the divergent needs of the workstation and servers called for a second line. He called his server branch Toast. His experience taught him playing into the hands of his detractors so directly would eventually raise his project’s profile. Let them wisecrack about servers “being toast” — a common phrase would become his trademark.
Finally, Brandon decided everyone had had enough of the GUI wars. The X server concept was okay for serving a GUI across the network, but that was passé. The code base was a patchwork, as were most major elements in Linux Land, and Brandon was willing to start almost from scratch with a simpler GUI, since eye candy was hardly a concern. While work on Bread and Toast proceeded steadily, Brandon quickly invested the bulk of his man hours coding the new GUI, calling it Butter, of course.

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Let’s Pretend for a Moment I’m an Activist

Posted on January 3, 2012 by ehurst

What is the greatest political threat I see?

Our devotion to modern Israel is the single greatest threat to this nation. If I were to take up any political cause, it would be to convince the government to stop pretending Israel is important in any way to us. The problem is, most of the power behind that bad habit is my own fellow Christians.

It is obvious this is due to bad theology, and way too much evidence why it is bad theology. We can trace step by step, word for word, whence it came. This is something no true devotee will discuss rationally with another Christian holding an opposing view. That is, the Zionist Christians are so deeply welded to the notion, it might as well be God Himself. They have made an idol of it; there is no place for debate, much less correction. There isn’t enough money and power in this world to silence this threat.

Even if I was an activist, I’d have given up long ago. It won’t matter whether you find a particular Zionist Christian a true believer, simply misguided and someday they might get it right, or frankly intellectually dishonest (yes, quite a few are) — the net result is the same. It’s a symptom of Western objectivism, a feature of Western Christian heresy.

On the one hand, God does have a big raft of patience with people who embrace His Son. On the other hand, He has been known to take an awful big number of them Home all at once in times past. Frankly, I’m praying for the latter. These people are an embarrassment to His message, not to mention any hope of bringing His provision for justice to the earth. So long as this damned heresy holds sway, I don’t think any nation on this earth is safe.

I can’t even pretend anything I do will make much difference, except clarify things for those not afflicted with this blindness. God help us.

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Apparent Trend of Coups

Posted on January 2, 2012 by ehurst

In these modern times, the real take over comes in a series of coups d’état, versus one complete change.
I’m watching. It’s one thing to talk about some shadowy Illuminati as shorthand for some apparent group with an agenda to take over the world. It’s another thing to claim any actual detailed knowledge. Most of the crazies who claim to have some kind of inside line — Icke, Fulford, etc. — are reliably wrong on most of their prognostications. A few who did seem once to have some access appear to have lost it, and they are running on reputation alone. They all demand substantial payment for their output. All I’m doing is trying to match my limited history reading with what I see actually happening, and offering to let you compare notes. It beats whining and cowering in fear.
What I believe I see are several competing groups, each with their differing scheme for taking over the world. I suspect all the ones I see are working for someone/something higher up, perhaps human, but by no means humane. I’m utterly convinced most of what we see is not the agenda itself, but the means and method, and all of them are likely to bring similar results in the end.
Perhaps you are aware, for all intents and purposes, the Federal Reserve rules the US. That is, whatever the Fed wants, it gets, and no agency can tell them “no.” But you also have to understand the massive back channel planning and communication the Fed has with a large number of other folks and agencies. I’ve tried to follow that in the past, but it’s too complicated and murky, constantly shifting. The point is, the current trends in world human affairs is being steered by what amounts to plutocrat bankers.
Whether you want to imagine they are all Jews, Masons, Opus Dei, or whatever isn’t going to do anyone much good. Whatever robe they wear, it can be easily changed and they probably wear multiple different costumes in a single day, as it were. I can honestly report it seems they have used all of the different secret societies and various religious covers at different times for utterly cynical reasons. Yes, some Jesuits have been involved; some of what they do does seem to reflect Jewish Messianic Expectations; some of them have shaped what Freemasons teach. You’ll be wrong if you try to tie it to any one false front, because they also worked through Nazis, the Klan, and through certain Reformation figures. Today they are also working through a lot of Muslim fronts. Nothing is sacred to these people.
Current expectations? They are using national bank wobbles to take over non-democratically, so far. They’ve done it in Greece and Italy, and are working on it in the rest of the PIIGS. In the case of Arab Spring countries, it’s replacing one set of thugs with another. Meanwhile, they have long taken over various international monetary alphabet agencies. There is a trend where governments and banks themselves are the only agencies using credit, as all real business, and consumers especially, have been squeezed out of the market. Even the unions are being clobbered, by pulling their jobs and their economic leverage out from under them. The trends are clearly anti-democratic, and only by ignoramuses could those trends be imagined particularly communist or capitalist. TPTB are leveraging the mythical necessity of banking to simply take control over every democratic institution. Banks and governments are two edges of the same sword.
In each place they do this, the context is loaded with all sorts of fluctuating and varied details. You can make a case study of each one and it would not be the same everywhere, except in certain trends which seem to be present. Where the people are rowdy, TPTB simply wear them down while sidestepping them. Look for the Delphi Method writ large, by misdirecting most folks away from real issues, isolating the genuine rebels who understand, etc., disemboweling all significant resistance. Yes, it’s happening in the church, too, which is where I really began to understand it. There is no publication permitted of the idea “we have nothing left to lose.” Always give them just enough to survive, but make everything utterly dependent on system control. Give everyone possible a sense of dependency and fear, not willing to break out of the system, destroying any hope of self-reliance — destroy human nature in the mass of humans.
So in each country, the trend is to displace any democratic influence, to remove the people as an element in consideration. Wars and warfare are used to consume the strong, create impossible debt burdens, even while removing all economic productivity to nations already under cooperative tyrants. As a correlative, automate everything possible so fewer humans are needed for whatever is produced. And if they don’t die in warfare against others, then on their own streets over any number of social instabilities. Meanwhile, poison them slowly by co-opting every source of food production, every medical provision, every thing they touch and use. Make the masses superfluous.  Those who survive will be zombie worker ants, fleshbots.
Yes, radical depopulation is part of the plan, but TPTB are willing to let most things run the natural course of decline to get there.
None of this is surprising to anyone paying attention. Any victories we have against it are temporary. The power to stop any real threat is far above you and I, but it’s completely valid to want to keep an eye on things and communicate what we see amongst our widely scattered selves. I figure the Internet is the one thing worth fighting for, as even TPTB need something like it to do their own work.
But let’s keep watching, and see if a major trend is not taking over in domino fashion a series of national governments in Europe — removing any hint of democracy — and the Middle East — putting in pro-banking thugs.

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